3AW’s Mark Holden and Morris Miselowski discuss Christmas on line
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
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Choose Forward.
Online Christmas shopping shifted the power dynamic decisively toward the consumer. Choice, comparison, and convenience became defaults rather than differentiators. For Australian retailers, that change removed geographic protection — a local store no longer competes only with the shop next door, but with every retailer accessible via a browser.
Christmas online shopping is a stress test that reveals what consumers actually value when they have full choice. Speed, price transparency, and low friction consistently win. The behaviours that emerge under Christmas pressure — mobile purchasing, last-minute delivery expectations, comparison shopping — become the baseline for the rest of the year.
The challenge is not simply competing on price — it is competing on experience and certainty. Online retailers offer convenience; physical stores must offer something that cannot be replicated on a screen. That means rethinking what a store actually does: whether it is a transaction point, a discovery space, or a relationship hub. Most have not answered that question clearly enough.
Christmas retail acts as an accelerant for trends already in motion. The shift to online in Christmas spending mirrors what is happening in financial services, healthcare, and professional services — consumers are becoming comfortable transacting in spaces that once required physical presence. The Christmas season makes the trend visible and measurable.
Prepare for expectation transfer — when consumers experience same-day delivery or seamless returns during Christmas, they carry that expectation into every purchase for the rest of the year. Businesses that treat Christmas as an isolated peak miss the longer signal: each year’s Christmas season resets what customers consider acceptable service everywhere else.
