COVID-19 turned 2020 into the year of e-commerce, but a retail expert with integrated design firm Mackenzie says it will take more than vaccines to turn 2021 into the year consumers flock back to in-store experiences.

With a client list that includes Fred Meyer, 24Hour Fitness and many others, Makenzie offers services ranging from land use planning and structural engineering to interiors. That gives Terry Krause — the firm’s principal, architect, and head of retail — a good sense of how activities such as shopping and working out will evolve as the pandemic is slowly contained.

Beyond the expansion of options such as curbside pickup and delivery, many retail brands that have managed to reopen have had to make major changes to their physical environments.

Some of these changes, such as layouts that mandate one-way flows of shoppers or limits on the number of shoppers in-store, are at odds with traditional CX objectives of getting more people through the doors. The question is which of these will remain throughout 2021 or longer, and which ones will slowly fade away.