Predictions for Retail? What about real news from the ground to start 2022!

2022 just starting and it's raining predictions all around. Retail, followed by its bunch of gurus, specialists, samoura?s, and other veterans, like any other industry the past years, has developed technology like crazy, forced by a pandemic to focus on where the future of its business is. Like what?

From E-commerce, mobile shops, self checkout, last mile delivery, in-home delivery, drones delivery, supply chains and warehouse, BOPIS, to programmatic, technology is everywhere, with its trends, coming together by somehow sometimes where the wind is blowing from Seattle or Bentonville.

Well, good. But there is still a lot of square meters around, where AI and some pieces of hardware (I mean like mobile phones, or fixed cameras) has opened a back door to automated inventories for some time already. But speaking about "Retail Renaissance" does not mean that the shelf intelligence has been fully unpacked. Reminding a big period of my career as a controller, I can see that "we" barely go further to some lines of the P&L to prove something, while analytics can really provide relevant elements of productivity. Realtime, while daily sales are transformed thanks to a constant effort from dozens of associates in store.

And inside: People.

Inc. just published its pack of predictions for Retail for 2022, and I was interested by the last of their 5: Store Associates Will Become a Significant Competitive Advantage.

Yes, technology and then what? What about associates with their job starting from 5AM sometimes to prepare the customers shopping day: check the shelves and where products are missing, purchase products, control prices, control inventories, refill the shelves several times a day maybe. Even worst, ask associates all day long to run in the backroom at the first notification of an item in the shelf? What about taking care of shoppers in the middle of this rush?

"Retailers that optimize for experience and customer retention and adopt more customer-centric metrics around Net Promoter Score (NPS)?will be better positioned to win markets, irrespective of channel.". What's going on in a store is still I think a better factor influencing what customers could think about their favorite Retailers. Bringing groceries directly to their fridge seems to me a bit of science fiction, but manage properly inventories in stores at scale (not just for 30% of an hypermarket in best cases) can be fixed...because it seems some Retailers still think science fiction when you talk about robotics in store. No Ssir, it's just happening.

A perfect example is the collaboration Simbe Robotics developed with Schnuck Markets since 2017, covering soon the whole chain of their stores:

• Detecting 14x more addressable out-of-stocks than manual scans
• Enabled 20–30 percent reduction in out-of-stock items
• Increased price tag and promotional execution compliance in stores across tens of thousands of products per day
• Increased accuracy of real-time inventory integrated into Schnucks’ automated replenishment system, streamlining ordering and ensuring store shelves are restocked quicker to meet customer needs
• Delivered access to real-time product location data through the Schnucks Rewards app, enabling more efficient shopping trips for customers, restocking and fulfillment activities for store teams, and 3rd?party e-commerce partners

It's all been audited and validated. ROIed. At scale on stores of significant size. Meaning hypermarkets.

Predictions.

What about a potential interesting new use-case for in-store robotics about detection of produce freshness?

"As Simbe’s robots add the capability to help grocers fight food waste – one of the?most significant cost drivers?for the notoriously thin profit margins in the grocery business – chances are we’ll see more grocers adopt in-store inventory robots en masse.".

We're ready.

Read the article from The Spoon and see how to