The New C-stores: Connected

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The convergence of technology and pandemic practices are changing the way we shop. Instacart has opened its new connected store where smart carts and scan and pay are bridging online shopping with the brick-and-mortar store. Amazon’s Just Walk Out store format has expanded into suburbs, airports, and sporting event facilities. One airport location offers the ability to pay with your palm, a biometric step up from the smart cart or smartphone option. What are some of the longer-term possibilities for the future of how we buy things? This post is about how some of today’s emerging technologies could change the future shopping experience.

Smart Fabric

Future iterations of “just walk out” might involve reusable smart shopping bags made of smart fabrics that ring up each item as they are placed in the bag. There could also be purses, backpacks, and clothing made of a similar fabric, allowing the convenience of literally ‘grab and go’ to spread universally.

Smart Cars

Another option could be to check out in-car. Devices in the vehicle could ring up items as they are loaded so you pay as you leave. Delivery or shared vehicles could work the same way with groceries, clothing, and meal orders.

Virtual or Augmented Reality

Stores could become virtual showrooms for items you can order online. VR and AR displays rather than inventory would make shopping there a social experience. Some shops might offer physical displays of the digital items avatars can buy, such as luxury cars or clothing. They might accept as payment the various virtual currencies that shoppers earn in metaverse games and worlds.

Neurotech

As brain chip and brain wave technologies take hold, stores could someday accept a brainprint as payment. Brainprints are as unique as a fingerprint, but they are much harder to falsify. If neurotech moves into the shopping arena, identity and payments would be an obvious fit.


These are just a few imaginable ways that we might shop differently in 10 or 15 years as a result of technological innovation. An interesting perspective was offered by Bruno Garcia of Frog UK, who said the post-pandemic store has the opportunity to transform into a third space, like a local bar or café, where people go partly for the products and partly for the social rewards. We might soon find out that connected technologies are catalysts for stores as places of community connection.