In 2022, visits to grocery stores were five percent higher than in 2019. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The COVID pandemic was supposed to usher in the next era of retail – an era that was to be dominated by online shopping, an era that would doom physical retail and lead to fewer store visits and more store bankruptcies and closings. Instead, consumer shopping behaviors during the pandemic are now looking more like a temporary detour from the consumer priorities and behaviors prior to lockdowns in March 2020. For more than a decade we have examined how the retail industry has been restructuring and, as we detailed in 2018, how consumer brands and the retail industry have been dealing with wave after wave of change. In this most recent wave, retailers and brands are having to adapt to consumers who are rethinking their relationships with e-commerce and physical retail as well as adjusting to new consumer spending behaviors and priorities in the face of inflation and the end of pandemic-era government financial support.