In Plaza Central in Santo Domingo, the Samsung store runs to about 100 square metres. The operator stores in the same mall run to roughly five times that.

Samsung uses the space better. Not marginally better. Better on range, better on merchandising, better on the basic discipline of telling a customer what something costs without having to ask a member of staff.

That comparison sat with me for the rest of the day, and it is the reason I am writing this rather than filing the photographs and moving on.

The best commercial space I stood in all day had a bakery in the middle of it.

Not a phone. Not a router. Not a converged bundle. A cafe with a wine cellar and a bakery, working in full view, in a shopping centre in Santo Domingo. It was better designed, better merchandised and better staffed than anything either national operator put in front of me that day.

That should bother our industry more than it does. Claro and Altice sell technology. They employ engineers. They run the networks that carry a country. And their stores look like anything but technology businesses. Contrast that with Samsung, who had a great space at 100sq metres which left the telcos for dead quality wise.

I spent a day in August walking the Santo Domingo retail market, just after CANTO, with a group of industry people and a few subscribers to this blog who preferred to see it rather than read about it later.

We started at Occidental Mall for the smaller, community end of the market. Then BlueMall for the premium end. Then Ágora Mall and Sambil to compare the two big operators in large, high traffic centres. Plaza Central for the fragmented independent mobile and electronics scene. Then the Zona Colonial, partly for the photography, mostly because you cannot understand a market from inside air conditioning.

The route matters, because the contrast only shows up when you put the operators against the best retail their own market has already produced.

Most people outside the region still file the DR under emerging market and move on. That assumption is several years out of date.

The middle class is expanding quickly. The malls are bright, airy and genuinely pleasant to move through, which is more than can be said for a lot of European retail property. Demand for quality retail is visible in every direction, and the international brands have noticed.

Which is what makes the telecoms retail scene so hard to explain.

Claro has not changed much. The same sanitised corian, chosen because it needs no maintenance and no real cleaning, and delivering no comfort whatsoever in return. It is a material specified for the estate team, not for the customer.

The journey is take a ticket, sit down, wait, go and get something done. There is no triage worth the name, so a customer with a complex converged question queues behind a bill payment. Dwell is not encouraged anywhere in the design, and the honest consequence is that a high value customer has no reason to walk in at all.

The experience zones at Sambil made the point more sharply than any slide I have ever built. Televisions that were not connected to anything. Set top boxes showing nothing. And nobody standing in the zone to explain what any of it could do in a customer's home.

An experience zone with no experience and no human in it is just furniture with a logo on.

Altice were better, and noticeably so on welcome. The retail execution is friendlier and more inviting, and you feel the difference within about four seconds of walking in. That is not a small thing, because welcome is the cheapest lever in retail and most operators still get it wrong.

The problem is consistency. The estate is spread across a number of formats, with different sizes and visibly different standards of execution store to store. A customer cannot learn what an Altice store is, because it is a different thing each time.

Product display is still weak, and there is a distinct lack of anywhere to sit. So dwell suffers for the same reason it does at Claro, just in a more pleasant room.

BlueMall is very high end, to the point where the telco stores in it looked slightly out of place. But the space that stopped the group in its tracks was a cafe.

The bakery was open to view, so the making of the product became part of the selling of it. The full height of the unit was used deliberately, the bar and back bar dressed in spirits and brand design rather than left as dead air above eye line. Fresh juices sat in an open ice bath for the breakfast trade. And at the side, they had invested seriously in a triple glazed wine cellar with oversized bottles and shelving so high that the better bottles need a ladder.

Look at what that space earns. A coffee becomes bread taken home. Bread taken home becomes something bought as a gift. And the cellar turns a person who came in for breakfast into someone buying wine for their own collection, or for somebody's birthday.

That is basket size engineered through space. No app, no screen, no QR code. The group spent a long time on two things: how well height had been used as a brand device rather than as a filler, and how little digital the space had needed in order to feel modern.

Plaza Central gave us the same lesson in a rougher setting. A drinks retailer had used bars, cafe tables and sofas to build somewhere you could actually stop and unwind inside a very busy mall. Crisps, mates and cheeses were merchandised exactly where you would want them once you had sat down with a glass.

Dwell was not a nice to have in that store. Dwell was the mechanic. You sit, you taste, you buy the case. I’ll be posting that video soon on my LinkedIn - watch out for it!

Here is the fair challenge, and it is the one an operator will put to me in the room.

The ticket and bench model has served these businesses extremely well. It carried them through years of high growth, when the job was to process volume as cheaply as possible. Customers here now expect it. They arrive knowing they will take a ticket and sit on an uncomfortable seat, and they are not complaining loudly enough to force a change.

Nobody rips out a working model because a consultant liked a cafe.

So how do you prove a different model is the way?

The case is not made on how the store looks. It is made on two numbers: revenue per square metre, and average basket size.

Start by segmenting the estate rather than treating every store as the same thing. Then take the simple service traffic out, into self-service, the app, kiosks and lower cost formats, because that traffic consumes the most space and contributes the least margin. In one Caribbean market, our benchmark work found that roughly a third of store floor space was being absorbed by transactions that generated no margin at all. Once leadership sees that number, the conversation changes from design to real estate.

Then shrink the boxes. Some of the Claro stores in these malls run to around 500 square metres, and they are paying premium mall rent on space that generates close to nothing.

That is where the money comes from. Reinvest it in fewer, better spaces where a customer can sit down, ask a real question, and be sold to properly by somebody who has the time to explain.

Do that, and the customer buys more, trusts you with the decision, and comes back. The estate gets cheaper and more productive at the same time, which is the rare combination that makes a CFO listen.

It takes a brave operator to move first. The risk is smaller than it looks, because the savings fund the upgrade.

Walk into the Samsung store in the Agora Mall. It is around 100 square metres, a fifth of the size of the operator stores in the same mall. It carries a strong product range, the merchandising is well executed, and the product ticketing is done properly, which sounds unglamorous until you notice how many telco stores cannot tell a customer what anything costs without an advisor.

It is not perfect. Samsung needs somewhere for a proper discussion to happen, and if they added it they would have a genuinely strong retail presence in the Dominican Republic.

But it removes the excuse. If a device brand can merchandise a full range that well in 100 square metres in Santo Domingo, no operator in that market can argue the customer is not ready for it.

The store is no longer just a place to transact. It is the physical expression of the brand, the trust layer for complex products, the bridge between digital and human service, and one of the very few places left where an operator can build any real emotional loyalty.

If your store looks and feels like a queue management system, then that is your brand. The customer is not making a subtle distinction between the room and the company.

Santo Domingo has the malls, the middle class and the appetite. It has retailers proving daily what good looks like, some of them selling nothing more complicated than bread and wine. The operators have the products, the data and the customer relationships, and they are still using their best real estate to hand out tickets.

The gap between those two facts is the opportunity.

I run these retail safaris around industry events now, walking a market properly with a small group and arguing about what we find. If you want to be on the list for the next one, get in touch.

Amplify: straight talk on telecom retail, every fortnight, from someone who’s worked in 75+ countries.

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