It’s no secret that there have always been two possible versions of the annual NRF show in January. One is after a strong retail year, when the mood is celebratory. The other is after a tough retail year, when people come together to commiserate. Either way there is a lot of free booze.

But there’s another, more important way that the annual Big Show can be “versioned “, and it has a lot more to do with substance than mood. Some years the expo floor is all about the future – and some years it is all aboutreaction. Allow me to explain.

We’ve been waking the show floor for longer than most of us would care to admit. And some years, we see most vendors touting exciting (if not always entirely feasible) future scenarios. These are fun shows to attend – last year was very much one of these types of events.

But some years, vendors look around and realize that retailers just haven’t been spending on the futuristic stuff. And that means that technology has outstripped the pace of adoption, and retailers are likely behind the curve. These shows result in technologists being forced to “get back to basics, ” touting solutions that require much less imagination on retailers’ behalf.

And when planning what they’ll demonstrate in their booths at NRF each year, technology vendors are essentially asked to walk a highwire figuring out which tack is most appropriate for the coming January. So which will it be this year?

Truth is, when you think about stores (a core requirement for NRF’s Big Show) not much has changed in the past 12 months. Yes, that’s a broad and sweeping statement. But as someone who still does quite a bit of in-store shopping (after copious amounts of online pre-shopping), I feel comfortable saying it. I ran it by my partners, and they happened to agree. Of course there have been significant – and headline catching – re-imaginings of flagship stores, even a handful of brand-wide-new-and-exciting-in-store technology rollouts. But for me, the only real difference I’ve noticed in my shopping travels is that I’m required to use a chip reader for my credit card at several chains. Which, as something that takes more time and provides no greater security, doesn’t really qualify as an improvement.

In fact, ask yourself: how different are most of the stores you frequent this year than they were last year? How different are they than they were the year before?

I attended both the Shop.org and Internet Retailer shows this year, and both featured expo floors that were very much future-looking, as one might expect. But for technologists trying to get the attention of retailers who operate stores at NRF? Based on what we see in stores, and what our data tells us about the back-to-basics solutions retailers are currently investing in (and budgeting for in the foreseeable future)… well, they might just want to focus on basics.

We’ll be doing our annual post-show webinar to review exactly what we saw, and we’ll know a lot more about which NRF Big Show was appropriate for 2016 at that time. I hope you can join us.