`Buy, buy, buy. That’s the one thing you want when your customers come to your store. For what other reason would they have to come to you?

Food, new clothes, furniture, a drink, open their wallets and, well, things sure have changed, haven’t they? Read “Retail Recovery” by Mark Pilkington and see how retail survival hinges on buying in.

If you’ve paid attention in the last 22 months, you can clearly see how shopping has changed.

First of all, Pilkington says, big retailers shuttered in droves or were bought up by larger entities that left storefronts empty and landlords struggling. Big brands often disappeared along with their stores or they cut manufacturing – and this is if they could even get goods shipped here from overseas and trucked to physical locations.

Because of that difficulty in finding a store to in-person shop – coupled with shelter-in-place –consumers moved online for their shopping and learned to love the convenience.

What a mess.

This, Pilkington says, has been “brewing up” since about 2015, so it’s not new. But while consumer spending as we know it “went through these difficult changes, the groundwork was being laid for a potential, yet very substantial, retail revival,” he says.

Because consumers have shown they’re willing to pay more for products if purchased from a service business, smart retailers have learned to set themselves up as professionals or experts. Consumers, Pilkington says, also want to shop with a conscience and they are attracted to businesses that are “purpose-built.”

Retailers must learn from websites by using data collected from your customers and by integrating web + physical presence. Hire a customer service consultant and learn to embrace “showrooming” by offering customers home delivery or automatic re-ordering.

Remember: bricks-and-mortar stores can lend personal touches that online entities cannot. Retailers need to utilize that huge advantage by offering customers more than they can get from an anonymous website.

It’s “The only route forward...,” Pilkington says.

There’s something good to be said about “Retail Recovery,” but not until about a third of the way into the book.

For the first 80 pages, author Mark Pilkington tells readers things they already know: Stores struggled, declared bankruptcy and closed in recent. Yes, there are stats, and, yes, he writes about the outlook overseas, but it’s more of the same, of which business-readers are already well aware. It’s a reminder, for sure, but a dismal one at that.

Get through the stuff you already know – skim it, if you want – and then settle in. There’s advice in the last two-thirds of this book, as well as intriguing information that might help find the survival skills you might need if you’re a retailer. You might think it’s pretty commonsensical when you’ve seen it in print.

Bottom line, this book is worth a try, but beware its redundancy. In your heart, you already know this stuff, but “Retail Recovery” still might help attract customers to buy-buy-buy.

Terri Schlichenmeyer’s reviews of business books are read in more than 260 publications in the U.S. and Canada.