Future of Physical Retail - Where did the Humans Go?

While brick-and-mortar accounts for about 90% of all sales, there's little doubt physical retail is being disrupted. While even retail future evangelists and branding experts remind us of the importance of the human touch, I cannot help thinking these thinkers are out of touch with young people and the future generation of consumers.  

Digital is what we’ve become but visceral is what we crave - Dough Stephens

Young people who see no separation between the digital and the physical. Their smart phones, wearables and the simulations they have grown up with are as real to them as the physical. Video content or a screen at a store, or an SMS message to them, is not the noisy intrusion that takes away from physical sensory delight it may to us. With the advent of AR-VR and more pervasive hybrid interactions, physical delight of shopping may indeed have a more varied palette and array of flavors. 

I'm not saying that brick-and-mortar will ever go extinct, but the digital is merging with the in-store experience, and this is a trend that is going to accelerate. 

Global B2C Ecommerce Sales in billions. 

In a world where almost every aspect of our lives is somehow tethered to technology, experiences that engage our bodies, our senses and our souls are at a premium - Dough Stephens, Retail Prophet

Yes there will be some backlash of technology's exponential rise, and why wouldn't there be. It's going to disrupt the future of Retail and of work itself completely. Genuine social experiences online are already at a premium, in just 10 to 15 years customer service from a real human being will be a luxury! But younger generations won't care. 

So many of these branding academics and evangelists forget to see the world through the lens of the young, people who grow up with more digital immersion as a default baseline have different standards of what is human, normal and where a separation exists. If I grew up texting, is the smartphone not a part of my self? 

What we see as digital immersion, is just the new normal and the way things have always been for younger people. 

The dogmatism of Retail in its adaptation to technology, has always been highlighted by a fundamental generation-gap where the digitally native consumer was not always a priority, it's only increasingly and now that Retail recognizes Millennials will be its future main persona and this transition is putting a lot of Retailers out of business. 

At least 30% of Retail stores will go out of business, in the next 10 years. Failure to expand to meet rising rent costs, failure to adapt to retail technology and consumer expectations is a common theme. 

There is a gap between the expectations of the Millennial consumer in the shopping experience that is omnichannel, and to what some Retailers can deliver. Even in Retail technology SaaS providers, I've witnessed this disconnect. How could a simple ten years of age difference, result in such a different frame of reference to all of digital life?

In Store Transformation 

Digital influences on the store is just the first part of how technology influences Retail sales. Technology in the store augmenting it, is what we are seeing happening now as the Internet of Things, digital signage, facial recognition, SMS push notifications and omnichannel personalization hits the in-store experience. 

This is not taking away from the physical retail experience, it's augmenting and making the consumer experience more seamless, varied and optimized for digital natives. So the future of physical Retail is bright, because technology is being merged with it. Even retail physical stores like a cafe can join a cloud point of sale system and be part of a revolution of data-augmentation in Retail where customers are known and transactions are no longer anonymous. 

Questions to Ponder

1.  As a consumer, will I mind being served by droids who know me better than a human being 10 years ago who served me did?
2. Will my identification with a brand be less simply due to less human contact?
3. Will the personalization of offers that technology will allow in real-time in 2025 not make up for the decreasing accessibility of physical retail and disproportionate lack of human staff as opposed to ten years before?
4. Will I still crave the big-box anonymous experience as opposed to a small-box more intimate shopping experience?

There appears to be a gap even between the technology evangelists and what the younger consumer will expect, so how are more legacy retail owners positioning themselves to keep up? Point of sale companies have to accelerate their acquisitions of companies that can impact the customer experience that is implicated in the unified commerce experience, or they are losing out to bigger companies that will take the lion's share of the exponential & data augmented retail technology of the future.

How do you see the influence of digital and technology in the in-store experience impacting your purchases as a consumer?