Let’s be real, we all went to a store in our lives at some point with one simple goal in mind: Get in, get your stuff and get out. No personal interaction, no waiting, no trivial aspects to stop us in our stride. We live in a busy world, a fast world. While the elderly generation values the interaction with the cashier at a retail store, the young generation, me included, quite often sees this friction as a loss of time, and thus money, resources.

This is where Christian Warning from The Retail Marketeers GMBH as well as a regional representative from the NACS chimes in. The NACS is the National Association For Convenience & Fuel Retailing. He introduced us in the context of the digital food business week to some international concepts, new and fresh, or old but improved. These solutions, both in concept and in reality, aim to solve the problems retailers face in this new age of consumerism, with what is called the new retail.

But what is the new retail? While new concepts to smoothen out consumer experience can be found all over the world, in order to truly see the “new” in new retail, we need to go on a journey. The journey leads us to China, the world of Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com. There, a new kind of offline retail store, called Hema is rapidly expanding. Hema, a subsidiary of Alibaba, merges the traditional concept of on-site retail with the new age of consumerism. Customers scan the products with their cellphones, to both obtain information of the product as well as buy the product. Payment happens digitally, cash is a thing from the past in the land of the rising sun. In addition, the customer has the option to get their freshly bought food cooked, directly on site by professional chefs. Furthermore, the app which is used to scan the products, tracks your purchases and can give you recommendations for things you might need or miss. This same app is used to order food directly from the store. Retail workers go around in the same store you previously did your offline shopping and collect the items you ordered. They promise a maximum of 30 minutes delivery time in a radius of roughly 3 kilometers. So essentially, this store is a retail market, a restaurant, a warehouse and an online shop in one single focused building. This is the new retail. The experience differs from person to person, individualization of how a shopping journey may look like is completely in the hands of the customer.

Conceptualization of Hema markets, 2016, colorized

Now when I first heard of this concept, my initial thoughts were quite simple. Awesome. No more friction, no more waiting lines. I used to work as a chef, so getting into contact with the product before I buy it is essential to me. Using my senses to perform a quick quality control is something is could not imagine living without, at least for now. However, not everyone around me thinks like that. The new retail allows each and everyone of us to shop exactly the way we want. But does this system translate well to the western market? According to Christian Warning, it does not. At least not for now.While the future is here, it is distributed unevenly as said by writer William Gibson. Quite the poetic thing to say, but at it’s core, a rather fitting statement. While the technology to create and maintain a concept like Hema is widely available not everyone is ready for it, ready to accept change.

When we are already in the field of rhetorical questions, I want to address another topic. How well does this system translate to society as a whole? We live in this ever digitally evolving society. Anything that can be done online, will be done online. Interactions between humans are frowned upon when it comes to services, because not only does it produce labor costs for the provider, but people just don’t want to interact with others. We are on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and LinkedIn, get bombarded with information and opinions wherever we go, even if we don’t want to. Sometimes we just want to take a step back and do our business without Uncle Carl telling us about how modern society is crumbling because Millenials and GenZ are failures, are lazy and just care about whether their milk is organic, vegan, fairtrade, CO₂ neutral and GMO free. Step off Carl, I just want a drink. Simultaneously, while people are connected everywhere and get to talk to others 24/7, a phenomenon has occurred in urban environments. The lack of interaction. People get lonely, while in the middle of a buzzing, living city, because their only interaction with others happens online. Society’s nightmare? A world where the solution to a problem is the problem itself? Now I need to step back for a moment, after all, I’m a food guy, not a philanthropist. But the question remains. Is the new retail the Introvert’s dream or Society’s nightmare? Or maybe they are both at the same time? Or maybe I’m just way out of my depth and this whole trend, luring in China, is just a faze, that either gets washed away by the tides of time, or does not even make it to Europe? We shall see, and I am definitely keeping track of it, and maybe, so should you.

Image Source: https://medium.com/@actallchinatech/whats-the-next-big-step-for-new-retail-in-china-e22802ea9206

Author: Silvan Wetzel