Week in Review - Tech can't drive a retail revolution quite yet

Saturday, October 03, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Howdy friends, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about how Alexa ain’t all that, this week I’m waxing poetic on the future of retail and why we aren’t ready.

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The Big Story

This was an insane week for news, with most of it centered in the political sphere. Either than a couple of noteworthy tech IPOs from Palantir and Asana, we didn’t get a ton of big announcements from major tech companies.

The strangest bit to emerge from a big tech company was Amazon’s announcement that it was bringing palm readers to its physical storefronts. In 2020, it seems like few people really want to know what else could go wrong in our future, so, yeah, not that kind of palm reader. Amazon is instead opting to rethink the QR code with a person’s palm print as they attempt to simplify the onboarding process for establishing identity for shoppers entering their Amazon Go convenience stores.

This isn’t exactly a mind-bending development, places like Disney World have been using fingerprint readers to reduce ticket fraud and tie identities to passes. But this is only the latest update that Amazon has pushed for their checkout-free stores of the future.

There’s a question to worth surfacing on why Amazon is building such data-hungry products in the first place, a company like Apple wouldn’t begin to think of an approach like this. For the most part, Amazon’s products are built in a fundamentally optimistic point-of-view. What if we can build this thing and capture this data and everything goes according to plan? There are certainly safeguards but they tend to happen after data has already been collected, as opposed to other companies that might opt to lean on edge processing data fully to avoid any data nightmares. This is all a (lengthier than intended) aside to my real question which is what does the future of personalized shopping look like?

It’s assuredly data-driven, and will work hard to establish the basics of online adtech for the physical world so that shoppers can walk into retail experiences that feel more connected to their online habits. One of the things that has been interesting is witnessing just how slow the progress here is.

Part of it is that things have been moving so quickly in the e-commerce sector that physical retailers have had to focus most of their “innovation” energy on reaching parity online. That’s largely been enough of a challenge, and it’s taken tech-first companies encroaching on physical retailers to push any big progress forward at all. Countless startups are building everything from smart shopping carts, smarter self-checkouts and full-blown Amazon Go copycat systems.

I think the issue for the folks like Amazon is that it’s easy to see retail’s future but it’s also clear that the building blocks aren’t where they need to be yet. Given how infrequently technology infrastructure is updated in physical retailers, it doesn’t really make any sense to pursue any type of substantial rollout on a bet that might lead to dead-on-arrival tech. Like restaurants, physical retailers are likely well-acquainted with this game and won’t be itching to meaningfully roll-out anything that relies on broad assumptions of tech progress.

Relying on full-store retrofits with new cameras and weight sensors and palm readers may prove too much of a challenge, and driving one-sized fits all updates to a website is just always going to be a better use of time, even if it means leaving retail sales more of a black box. We might not see the future of physical retail until we can update in-store infrastructure as easily as a digital platform, or exactly with a digital platform like augmented reality.

So while Amazon Go stores offer a futuristic feel to the act of buying a sandwich, I would guess that chances are things will probably stay largely the same for another decade or so when it comes to in-person shopping but then things could change very substantially and very quickly.

Image Credits: Amazon

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Palantir and Asana go public
A productivity suite and a tech-centric government contractor went public this week and their IPOs seemed to go well even if every expectation wasn’t met. More here.

Google pays publishers $1B
Google, and tech in general, have had a complicated relationship with the free press. Google has upended advertising and the path forward for the news business. Now, Google is shelling out cash for a new initiative. Read more here.

Amazon launches personal shopper service
There’s never been a startup so small that Amazon isn’t interested in stealing their lunch. This week, Amazon launched a $4.99-per-month men’s fashion shopping service aimed to compete with services like Stitch Fix. Read more here.