The Future of Retail

This comprehensive 80 paged report on the future of shopping gives an incredible look into what the world will evolve into thanks to advanced technology.

It offers the plenty of ideas of how business owners and consumers alike can share their retail experience on a much more personal level. From logging into Facebook directly from a store, to lending iPod Touches to hotel guests for a guided tour of their surroundings.

It’s an interesting yet scary revelation that as social media evolves, the privacy of consumers is further and further blurred or revealed willingly to the public. Everything from where they are, what they’re buying, when they’re buying and who they’re friends with. Some technologies may offer photo recognition of certain branded products and receive further information of where there could be a retailer selling the product (say Coke bottle). In Japan, if users happen to listen to a song they like but have no idea who is singing, they simply need to put up their phones to record the audio and it would connect to a database that will search and match the audio waves.

What was quite obvious and biased of PSFK’s report is the sole use of Apple products (iPod, iPhone, iPad) to carry out the “Future of Retail”, which is a presumptuous assumption that just because Apple is the hottest product on the market it was best suited to dictate how we shop. I have no doubt that Apple has made significant progression in how we interact with the world, but let’s assume that certain smartphones on Android could probably carry the job just as well.

In the end, what this report represents is the further progression of transparency and the near disappearance of privacy. Soon, people will be able to scan each other’s outfits and identify every single item on their phones, we can have face-recognition and pull up an entire online file of that person’s online life. So we are virtually getting to know each other without even invading that person’s real personal space. Fashion enthusiasts are already willing to divulge all their purchases, their feelings on products, and displaying what they’re doing and thinking, and sometimes where they are. It seems inevitable that the fashion industry will be on a path of ultimate transparency, but is the world ready?