Shopping as if nature mattered: the future of retail
From Future of Local Services to the Public
Contents |
Summary
The retail sector is likely to look very different in 2022. A report by Forum for the Future offers a glimpse of what the retail experience might come to involve, providing a tool that enables the retail sector to explore leadership in sustainability, taking responsibility for its impacts and empowering customers to do their bit. The report puts forward a number of different scenarios:
- A bright glass building, crowned with wind turbines and coated in solar panels: a vertical farm - climate controlled, filled with fruit and vegetables, and even a few pigs. It generates its own energy, harvests water from the rooftop and markets produce on the ground floor to local businesses and residents.
- Communities increasingly turn to bartering and other peer-to-peer exchange schemes to cope with an economic slowdown. Many consumers have become traders in their own rights, making a living through selling goods and services online directly to others.
- People have stopped shopping altogether - at least for everyday staples. Instead customers can receive milk, bread, pasta, washing powder and toilet tissue whenever they are needed, triggered by messages sent automatically to the retailer direct from their cupboards and fridges.
The sustainability challenges raised by this exploration of the future include the tensions between choice and choice editing, customisation and efficiency, local and global supply chains, consolidated and diverse supply chains, high standards and value, competition and collaboration and growing sales - all whilst reducing material impact.
A range of factors will affect what we buy, how we buy and who we will buy from in the next 15 years. They include: climate change, which is likely to affect agricultural production; higher - or lower - oil prices; new technology; advances in energy production; more globalisation and demographic changes that will mean more immigrant labour and more elderly and single person households.
Impacts
- Opportunities for businesses, who have responsibility for shaping the kind of future we want.
- Sustainability challenges: tensions between choice and choice editing, customisation and efficiency, local and global supply chains, consolidated and diverse supply chains, high standards and value, competition and collaboration and growing sales – whilst reducing material impact.
- New shopping formats, for example ‘Tesco Silver' outlets with customised products for retired baby boomers, a utility section at the back of a store with vast vats of liquids like fabric conditioner, where shoppers could fill reusable containers. And the long queue at the checkout could be history when bar codes are read for prices when an item is dropped into a trolley.
- Online revolution: entering your postcode for hyper-local sourcing, using the internet to cut out the middleman and source direct from farms and manufacturers.
- The explosion in the number of TV channels and the rise of the internet to download entertainment means store chains will have to work far harder to build, and keep, consumers' trust as the impact of advertising declines.
Relevance
Links
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2164956,00.html
http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/
References
Forum for the Future (2007) Retail Futures 2022
