Copyright Ian Pearson,
BT Futurologist
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Shopping can be a frustrating experience. Often, what we want may either not exist in an attractive form, or may not be stocked in our local shops. We are at the mercy of what manufacturers feel like manufacturing, what shops feel like stocking and worse still at the mercy of town planners who wonŐt let us have out of town shopping but do their best to stop us from coming into town too.
WouldnŐt it be nice if we could liaise directly with manufacturers and have personalised goods delivered to our front door? I could knock up a design on my PC and e-mail it to a T-shirt or tie maker for printing along with my size details. The product would be unique and I would be happy with it. Advanced computer manufacturing techniques make this an ever more economic prospect and many examples already exist (I can already take a floppy with my design along to a T-shirt printer).
Retailers expect to lose up to 20% of their income to home purchasing over the next decade or so and the more alert are already reinventing their role. It is easy to see how home shopping can be an attractive option. When we want hands on shopping across the net, we will wander through personalised shopping arcades, with all our favourite shops organised and visualised in any way we like, unconstrained by any laws of physics or architecture, only limited by our imaginations. Although shops in todayŐs malls want to impose their style and brand image, in the future, he who pays the piper will call the tune. CD ROM catalogues and digital TV will offer equally imaginative opportunities to displace conventional shopping. For purchases bought on the network or TV, packaging will be an irrelevance, and deliveries will probably use plain and simple cardboard boxes. Brand image will have to be maintained by other means.
If we prefer, intelligent agents will shop around the network with our requirements, negotiate the best possible deal from companies selling on-line, pay for the goods and arrange delivery. Of course, those companies that arenŐt selling on-line or who donŐt co-operate with agents will simply not be considered, many such companies will not survive. Other companies who try to sell at a premium without offering significantly better deals on some other criteria will also suffer the consequences.
Deliveries to each street will be much more frequent, enabling very efficient and responsive delivery indeed. Delivery agents will negotiate with suppliers and customers to arrange pickup and delivery. People may have goods delivered to home, work, or stored for later delivery or local collection. This storage function may possibly be a simple evolution of wholesaling.
By cutting out middlemen, massive savings are possible. The delivery costs will probably be no more than the cost of going into town. We will thus get personalised goods at much lower price. Previous retails functions such as offering advice can obviously be catered for on demand.
Of course, shopping also provides a social opportunity, but even this can be emulated in cyberspace. People may still shop with their friends for outfits for a party, seeing themselves simulated on screen with their friends in virtual malls. The computer could visualise what each of them would look like in their prospective outfits, even simulating a party background. They could play with different hairstyles or make-up too and of course this could be as much fun as function.
However, we will still have real shops for many years. Some of their function will be conventional, but they will also be used or abused as just Ôtry-onŐ outlets, where people try goods out in the shop, but ask their computer to buy it much more cheaply elsewhere. If this becomes too large a cost, they may have to charge either shoppers or manufacturers for this service. Of course, these same computers could be used to help us search for products, navigating us to the nearest sale or displaying information about shops as we pass them, all customised to our preferences of course.
Real shops will suffer other changes too. We will soon have cheap chips which are attached to goods so that we donŐt have to take ages at a supermarket till. The price of the goods could be automatically totalled as we push the trolley past a sensor. By glancing at a camera, our iris could be scanned to identify us to the shop. A smart card may also be needed to complete the identification, but then the goods can be automatically charged to our accounts. Some supermarkets will offer us semi-automated shopping, compiling our shopping lists automatically from our normal buying patterns as learned through our use of loyalty cards.
After years of frustration with conventional shopping, I for one canŐt wait for all these changes.
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