What does the store of the future look like?

No check-out staff. No queueing. Amazon’s new physical grocery store which enables shoppers to effectively grab and go, stunned consumers and the retail industry alike. So, will robots be serving us in the future, and will there even be a need for a physical store? We asked four experts for their views on the future of bricks-and-mortar shopping.

José Neves, founder and chief executive of luxury fashion website Farfetch, which owns London boutique Browns

I’m a believer in physical retail experiences; I always say “fashion isn’t downloadable”. You need the human element – a program or piece of technology won’t provide the full level of care, attention and assistance that a shop assistant or customer service team will give. This interaction and engagement is an essential component of providing a luxury experience. On the other hand, you can’t ignore technology. To succeed we need to strike a balance between the online and offline experience.

When it comes to the future of retail, I’m convinced that stores will be centre of the stage. What is going to change drastically is the way these physical stores operate and service their customers; it’s about a seamless merge of a fantastic physical experience with powerful, yet subtle technology. The fashion industry is still developing and adapting to the digital age we live in – the presence of technology and online reach is becoming more important and we are finding, more and more so, that disruption and innovation in technology can be forces for good. For physical stores it’s about “future proofing” from an online perspective and developing innovations in retail technology to give themselves strength offline. In 20 years, it may be that the idea of a distinction between physical and digital will be completely alien to customers. Even so far as, no one understanding – or remembering – that once upon a time stores did not have a digital point of access, or – conversely – that websites did not have a physical point where customers could continue to enjoy the retail experience and amplify it.

Toby Pickard, senior retail analyst at grocery research firm IGD

Physical stores are certain to become more closely synced with shoppers’ smartphones. The priorities will be to speed up the shopping process and to make the experience more exciting and engaging. There will be new and faster cashless ways to pay, and a growing number of experimental, checkout-free stores. Shoppers will be automatically identified – unless they opt out – when they enter the store and offered unique information and deals through their devices, tailored to their needs and purchasing history. Online shopping will become increasingly compelling and as our homes get equipped with smarter devices, many of our routine purchases will be automatically replenished and delivered to the location of our choice.

Physical stores will always be best for instant gratification and we are seeing stores experiment in various ways to enhance the experience, concentrating in particular on visual appeal, product freshness, provenance and health.

Robots will take on the more repetitive tasks, freeing up staff to offer more expert and personalised advice. Stores will become more like a showroom for people to discover and try new products and to sharpen up their food and cooking skills. If we look 20 years ahead, new technologies, not yet invented, will be helping to make shopping more convenient and compelling. The physical and digital worlds will merge to offer new services that we can’t even imagine today.

David Walmsley, chief customer officer at House of Fraser

Department stores are here to stay but they will need to move quickly to offer experiences that surprise and delight, and that are out of the ordinary. The role of technology in-store has to be to support these experiences. Technology in and of itself is rather sterile, and there have been too many instances in recent years of retailers getting carried away with gadgets and widgets that do not focus on the set of actual customer desires.

Amazon Go is a really interesting retail concept which fits a busy consumer lifestyle, particularly in the convenience store space. In this space people use words like “frictionless” and “painless” shopping. These are usually people who work in retail technology who themselves don’t seem to enjoy shopping. In House of Fraser we’re seeking to make our shopping experience more and more enjoyable, immersive and an everyday treat for our customers. We keep driving new experiences, from champagne bars to better buy and collect services.

The pace at which retail is evolving is incredible and it is difficult to predict what House of Fraser would look like in 20 years, let alone five. What we do know is that the customer continues to be at the very heart of everything we do. We are prepared to enter a new phase of mass personalisation – it is about understanding who our customer is, what they would like to buy and how they would like to buy it, it will be about making our customer’s shopping experience completely unique.

Petah Marian, retail editor at trends forecaster WGSN

Since Amazon’s announcement, there has certainly been a lot of noise from technology firms around their self-service and lower friction checkout systems, and retailers will be looking at whether this sort of solution is appropriate and what their approach should be. The initial assumption is that this would not work at a mid- to high-end fashion retailer, as consumers that shop in these sorts of stores like the theatre of having their products wrapped nicely in tissue paper as they pay. But Rebecca Minkoff, a US designer label, has already implemented a self-checkout solution in one of its stores, catering to that customer who doesn’t want to feel pressured by a sales assistant.

Robots have the potential to replace sales assistants. If you look at Gen Z, you can see that human interaction in stores is not something they always love. Some consumers feel judged by sales people. It’s a more common experience in a physical space than you would expect. So I think self-service and robots are more popular with that demographic. I don’t like to say it, but there’ll be fewer people working in retail.

With a growing trend towards brand partnership – for example womenswear brand Argent is selling its clothes at a co-working space in San Francisco – the store of the future might be around capturing customers in other spaces they already exist in.

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