Imagine walking into your local giant supermarket and being greeted by a smiling hologram waiting to take you to all points of interest in the shop.
What if you could wave your increasingly smart phone at an unusual vegetable and call up a virtual chef to take you through some brilliant recipes? Or imagine being able to hold your device up to a shirt hanging lifelessly from a rack so that a Gok Wan type could magically materialise to give you fashion tips.
It all sounds faintly ridiculous, right? Well, it isn’t. It could be the future of retailing, and it could be upon us sooner than you think.
Over the past two or three years, augmented reality has become one of the retail sector’s big talking points. This is a technology that superimposes computer-generated images on a user’s view of the real world. It is constantly refined to offer consumers a more seductive shopping experience, and to help maximise profits for big retailers willing to invest in emerging realities.
In days of old, World Fairs and Expos took place in great cities and left great legacies, such as the ill-fated Crystal Palace in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. How times have changed: the big attraction at the current Expo in Milan is a supermarket.
And not just any old supermarket. Designer Carlo Ratti’s concept shop is aimed at showing consumers ways in which their food buying could be completely transformed.
There are some 1,500 products on display in Ratti’s shop, most of them placed under digital mirrors that give shoppers information about the provenance of the product, the processes used in making it and its ingredients. At a glance, shoppers can see products’ carbon footprints, nutritional value and recipes. True, there is no sign of a hologram chef, but give it time.
Another feature of the future shop is a huge TV showing real-time data about the most popular products in the shop. It also broadcasts live the number of shoppers on the floor at any given moment, as well as the exact areas they are clustered around – just in case shoppers are ever afraid of missing out.
The shop has scrapped traditional shelf labelling and replaced it with electronic labels. This way, pricing can be controlled from a central office and price changes made instantly in order to introduce promotions on the fly. The supermarket also has robots in the fruit and vegetable aisles constantly checking the quality of the produce.
Consumer empowerment
The main reason Ratti’s shop exists is not to showcase technology, although that is what gives the place its wow factor. The main focus is food provenance and consumer empowerment.
The shop, which is stocked by the Coop supermarket chain, has a Love Italy theme, and 90 per cent of the stock comes from indigenous brands.
“The Future Food District explores how data could change the way that we interact with the food that we eat, informing us about its origins and characteristics and promoting more informed consumption habits,” Ratti said when opening his 21st- century store.
It all sounds a bit exhausting. Still, Ratti’s radical overhaul of the supermarket experience is only one link in a chain that is threatening to transform how we buy groceries.
Other developments
In recent times, Carrefour in France has rolled out smart lights. This technology can track customers as they move up and down aisles, with coupons beamed to their smartphones as they pass specific products.
How would you like your shopping data stored in the cloud? The cloud is not everywhere yet, but it is spreading and promising to break the bonds we have with our physical devices.
Just over a year ago, Booths, a 160- year-old supermarket based in northwest England, announced that it was scrapping paper receipts for holders of its new loyalty card in favour of storing them online. This online receipt depository allows customers to track how much they spend across a range of categories. With a bit of tweaking it can make it easier to compile shopping lists and to stick to budgets.
Then there is on-the-hoof scanning, which is not a new technology. Superquinn was the first and, it should be said, only retailer in the Republic to introduce scanning devices, and they never really went mainstream. That's a pity, as the notion is better than the ridiculous automated machines favoured by – unexpected item in bagging area – other supermarkets.
Superquinn’s scanner was simple. Shoppers picked up a big electronic device at the entrance and scanned items as they shopped. They kept a running total, so they knew how much they were spending and could get through the checkout faster.
The scanning model might still catch on. US retailers have taken it further by debuting apps that turn smartphones into barcode scanners. A supermarket in Paris is trialling an app that allows shoppers to scan items for nutritional information.
Barcodes and QR codes were once the future, but both might be on their way out. For more than three years, Toshiba has been working on a scanner that will use image recognition to price groceries. It is not easy to do, however; the scanners have to be able to tell the difference between a Pink Lady and a Pippin, which many human eyes might struggle with.
Toshiba’s Object Recognition Scanner is attempting to focus on patterns and colours in food in much the same way facial recognition scanners use different criteria to identify people. It is not there yet, but it will probably get there.
In the meantime, infrared cameras are already working in some shops. US chain Kroger uses infrared cameras to detect body heat in order to make shopping experiences faster. Cameras mounted at store entrances and cash registers are used to work out how many lanes need to be open.
Using the smart devices, the supermarket claimed to have reduced the average queuing times from four minutes to 26 seconds. Now there’s a technological advance we could all get behind.
