Retail is an important part of almost everyone’s life, which is probably why firms are so interested in new retail technologies. According to the US Census Bureau, total US retail sales have exceeded $3 trillion per year since 2000, with a high of 1.6% taking place on the Internet (fourth quarter, 2002). The bulk comes from traditional “brick and mortar” retailers for whom the store is the stage and the workers - and the consumers themselves - are players in the drama of the transaction. The spotlight of every retailer - small, large, independent, franchise – is thus, on the transaction and everything surrounding it.
Transactions “are one of the purest and most primitive forms of human socialization”.1 Shopping is a learned behavior, influenced by culture and society; such behaviors change over time. Retailers know this and thus focus their continuing efforts on creating and re-creating environments to enhance their transactions.
In our prior work, we established a framework that examines ecologies of consumption behavior from the perspective of the consumer. In this study, we adopted the perspective of both retailer and the customer and focused our attention on the transaction to identify useful and appropriate technological innovations. For this work, we’ve relied primarily on US based research, but have drawn from the extensive global ongoing ethnographic work of our entire team.
We established a layered approach for our work. We first conducted relatively brief observational and informal interview forays in a wide variety of retail establishments in a broad exercise one might loosely label as “compare and contrast”.
A second step was to “design in situ”. While in each shop, we conducted brainstorming exercises thinking about the sorts of technological innovations that might seem appropriate for that retailer. That is, we used invention as a means of understanding the nuances of each space, pushing on our own abstract understanding of each retail environment.
Finally, we developed a series of “probational concepts” that we used as interview probes to speak with both consumers and retail workers not only to understand their reactions to the concepts, but to identify in context further issues that would impact technology development for retail spaces.
The results are therefore twofold: broad areas that we believe have hitherto been overlooked as areas for innovation in retail establishments and specific concepts that we believe are indicative of these broad areas.
Some of each of these two categories are presented here.
