Met this gentleman on a plane and we had an amazing conversation of Health care exchanges and information. I did not know him other than that and posts on LinkedIN. I learned so much in such a short time.

The decline of Nike for the stated reasons make 100% sense. When ATMs came out, the bank I worked for in Canada, started losing market share as they replace physical banking locations with self-service ATMs. After 15 years of slow decline, they started to aggressively rebuild physical locations. They now believe you have to have BOTH - a clearly identifiable brick and mortar presence and ATMs.

Efficiency gains can look like pure wins on the balance sheet while quietly eroding customer relationships that took decades to build. The people who ran the numbers on ATM rollouts probably weren't wrong about transaction costs, they just weren't measuring what mattered most.

Imo Nike's D2C push had the same logic. Higher margins per sale, more control over the brand experience, direct customer data. All true. But it turns out that being on the shelf next to Hoka and On, where a customer can try both, was doing more work than anyone gave it credit for..

I don’t know about the US and Canada but in the UK banks have been closing branches forever. The ones that are left are more like showrooms than a traditional branch.