Chapter 8Chaim Katzman
1Gazit-Globe, Tel Aviv, Israel

The sky is not falling
Every time there is a shift in the market, there is a rush to be the first to proclaim that the “sky is falling.” In the real estate business, one only needs to look at the investors running around screaming about the “death of retail” to see that it’s happening again.
Right now, online business accounts for 2.5 percent of the United States GDP. That sounds like a significant number until you look at the mail order business, which accounted for more than 5 percent of the GDP just a century ago.
Every new startup in Silicon Valley talks about how it will disrupt the market as though disruptions were only invented in the past decade. They weren’t. Although Sears and Montgomery Ward began as mail order companies in the late 1800s, by 1930 they had stores across the country. Despite the massive success of their mail order sales business, people still love the customer experience.
According to Chaim Katzman, every big trend initially seems to change the world, and we often call it a disruption. Eventually, it slows down or disappears altogether. It becomes a part of the human experience, but things tend to return to equilibrium. A catalog can no more replace the shopping experience than a webpage. There is something that we love about going out of our homes and into a social environment to shop.
When VHS ...