Shop of no tomorrow

In Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character is recognized by his retina upon entering the Gap store, after which the clerk’s hologram asks for his opinion and makes recommendations. This is how the “shop of the future” was imagined by the authors of the film in 2002. And real market participants sometimes do not go far from screenwriters. “Supermarkets are a format of the past, we no longer deal with them,” Andrey Krivenko, the founder of Vkusvill, said in an interview with RBC in 2021, arguing the prospects for online business. But reality, as always, makes its own adjustments.

The other day, news appeared in the foreign media about the adjustment of the format of Amazon Fresh stores without cashiers. At two points in London, in addition to the Just Walk Out technology, which allows you to pick up goods and exit through a special turnstile with automatic payment, traditional cash desks have appeared. RetailDetail journalists note that this should allow Amazon Fresh to attract a wider audience. In a difficult economic climate, stores without cashiers find it hard to maintain traffic as consumers pay attention to prices, which were relatively high at Amazon Fresh, probably due to expensive technology solutions, writes RetailDetail.

For the Russian market, such projects were also a trend. Azbuka Vkusa, together with Sberbank and Visa, opened a store without cash desks and sellers in 2020 in Moscow City. Pyaterochka, which is part of the X5 Group, then began testing the Pyaterochka #on the fly format, where a mobile application was used for purchases, entry and exit. In 2021, in the Moscow City district, a store without cash desks and sellers launched Vkusvill. But there is no need to talk about the success of these projects now. Back in 2021, Azbuka Vkusa announced the suspension of the experiment. Pyaterochka #on the fly, judging by its website, operates in one store. And “Vkusvill” without cash desks and sellers in “Moscow City” is closed. The network says that they are in search of a new site.

My interlocutors in the market cite insufficient control as the main difficulty of such formats, believing that in a crisis, cases of theft should increase. And in an environment where even the largest Russian players are slowing down in revenue growth, it is hardly worth expecting new investments in innovative formats from them. According to my sources, innovation can now only be dictated by the economy – for example, payment services that allow networks to save on bank fees. Perhaps the rejection of overly futuristic concepts will even benefit some players and they will focus on improving more mundane and important services for consumers.