Lately, the overwhelming amount of success e-commerce sites like Amazon has had the retail world scrambling, in danger of extinction. According to research conducted in May 2017, only 47% of retail companies are still functioning after four years of launching; brick-and-mortar stores may be a fading breed.
However, there may just be a kink in the armor of online shopping for retail stores to exploit.
The whole premise of e-commerce is the fact that consumers can shop from the comfort of their homes, within the confines of their office spaces, or on the go while traveling. Yet, the one thing that websites selling merchandise lack, is the ability to tangibly handle and inspect products, namely including trying clothes or accessories on and examining the quality of products like crockery, electrical appliances or household furniture.
While retail stores cannot currently offer the same level of mobility and accessibility that websites do, they can offer tangibility. If this tangibility were to be coupled with the same ease with which customers make purchases upon the click of a button on the internet, it would surely be a game-changer for the declining retail industry. And with the possibility of mobile retail stores, maybe there's hope after all.
Retail on wheels would therefore not only solve the problem that online businesses have regarding discrepancies between the product presented online and what is delivered to the consumer, but they would also allow brands to lower the enormous overhead costs that accompany setting up physical stores, mainly entailing skyrocketing rent and maintenance costs as well as the need to hire staff and managers. Most importantly, business owners wouldn't be bogged down by a location if it proved to be unsuccessful and unpopular with the public.
The prospect of these "mobile malls", so to speak, are made more luminous by the advent of autonomous vehicles. Although a slew of renowned automobile companies such as Tesla and Ford have been making advances towards producing such vehicles, recently a technology company called Oxbotica partnered with delivery service Ocado in London to release a small fleet of self-driving vehicles called CargoPods. These vans serve to effectively eradicate any middleman costs the company incurs and delivers groceries directly to the doors of consumers.
There are two people inside each autonomous vehicle because Ocado's test drives requires two occupants in order to ensure the logistics of the machine work out and the order is adequately fulfilled. Yet, if projects like this prove to be a success, then perhaps in the future humans will not even be needed in the vehicles themselves as the whole process could be mechanized, further reducing costs and allowing companies to expand their reach with the mobile shops instead.
That being said, this could also endanger hundreds of retail jobs nation and world-wide as humans will be replaced by machines. The issue is that many of these jobs will anyway dissolve as the retail industry continues to decline- at least this way businesses will gain in some capacity.