The Retail Futurist, otherwise known as Howard Saunders, is a writer and speaker whose job it is to see beyond retail’s currently choppy waters.
Howard spent the first twenty five years of his career at some of London’s most renowned retail design agencies, including Fitch & Company, where he created concepts, strategies and identities for dozens of British high street brands.
In 2003 he founded trend-hunting agency, Echochamber, inspiring his clients with new and innovative store designs from across the globe.
Howard relocated to New York in 2012 where the energetic regeneration of Brooklyn inspired his book, Brooklynization, published in 2017. His newfound role as champion for retail’s future in our town and city centres gave rise to the title The Retail Futurist.
Howard has been interviewed on numerous television and radio programs and podcasts for BBC Radio 4, BBC Scotland, the British Retail Consortium, Sky News Australia and TVNZ, New Zealand.
His talks are hi-energy, jargon-free journeys that explore the exciting, if not terrifying, retail landscape that lies ahead.
When not in retail mode, Howard has recorded, literally, thousands of digital music masterpieces, most of which remain, thankfully, unheard.
In this fast-paced world of ours, convenience is king. We want everything now, and we want it easy. We order our groceries online, hail our cabs with a tap on our phones, and have meals delivered to our doorsteps.
The latest addition to this trend of instant gratification is Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ stores, where shoppers can grab what they need and simply walk out, without having to stop and pay at a traditional checkout.
But, my dear friends, let us not forget that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The constant pursuit of convenience can lead to a life that is shallow and devoid of adventure. We are so used to having everything handed to us on a silver platter that we forget the joy of going out and experiencing life for ourselves. We forget the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of the unknown.
The problem with convenience is that it often comes at a cost. We sacrifice quality for speed. We trade in the unique and the authentic for the mass-produced and the generic. The convenience of fast food might save us time, but it also dulls our palates and dulls our spirits. With Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ stores, we give up the opportunity to interact with human cashiers, and the potential loss of jobs is a real concern. Moreover, convenience can also breed complacency. When we are given everything we want with little effort, we start to take things for granted. We stop appreciating the simple pleasures of life and start to demand more, always wanting more.
In conclusion, my friends, let us not forget that there is beauty in the journey, not just the destination. Let us embrace the challenges and the difficulties, for they are what make life worth living. So, the next time you’re tempted by the siren call of convenience, remember that true satisfaction can only be found in the things we work hard for.
Instead of going to the pub on Friday night, how about I deliver a couple of pints of freshly poured beer to your front door? Save you the trouble of getting dressed, getting down there, fighting your way to the bar, fumbling for your card and having to endure the inane ping pong of ‘how you doin’ and how chilly it’s been. Sound like a deal?
Of course not. Because it’s the ping pong, those awkward little back and forths, the messy fripperies of life, that maintain and lubricate our social status. But small talk nonsense is no inconvenient by-product. It’s absolutely integral to the overall pub experience. (My teetotalist readers can simply exchange the p word for coffee shop. Very similar, only with more annoying customers)
Picture someone sitting at home with a cup of coffee: absolutely normal. Now picture someone sitting at home with a pint of beer: that’s just weird. In fact, if you boiled down the entire pub experience, distilled it right to its absolute essence then beer molecules probably wouldn’t figure at all. That’s because ultimately, pubs sell community, a funny intangible thing that’s stitched together by all those awkward inconveniences.
Ridiculous as my offer to deliver that tray of beers is, it’s precisely what we’re doing when we order our groceries online. We’re busy, we’re agitated and we’d rather be trapped overnight in a lift with Therese Coffey than patiently queue for the Sainsbury checkout experience. But it’s our fault. Our relentless quest for convenience has slowly but surely sculpted our supermarkets to the point that we’d rather not visit them at all.
Quite rightly Tesco is closing all its food service counters and hot delis. It only took us a quarter of a century to realise that the whole thing was a charade: Fake fresh produce that’s just an unwrapped version of the shelved stuff, served to you by a nylon hatted gen-zedder with as much interest in fine food as I have in musical theatre. The burly baker was already banished to the backroom ‘parbakery’ where qualifications require no more than the artisan dexterity of Peter Griffin. In fact, the decline in the number of counter shoppers has been so marked most supermarkets removed those charming HMRC style ticket machines many moons ago.
You see, it’s all customer driven: install a few thousand pretend service counters; unwrap the food so it looks fresh; employ the genetically disinterested…and then close them all to save money! That old adage springs to mind: “Build it and they will come. Build it shit and they won’t.”
Of course, it was bad supermarket service that gave Jeff the inspiration for his “Just Walk Out” staff-free concept. His wish came true. We just walked out because, it turns out, we prefer rude staff to none at all.
Never one to miss a golden opportunity I’m working on a new pub concept. Simply put, we’d remove all the service counters and replace them with chilled cabinets neatly lined with hermetically sealed pints of beer available to grab and go. The “Just Walk Out” public house would be more hygienic, more efficient and this way you’d get to drink with the ones you love at home rather than having to jostle with filthy, flatulent strangers.
Not convinced? Well, it worked with food. We’ve long learnt that there’s no need to waste time chopping ugly vegetables or getting flour down your cardy. Ready meals have revolutionised our lives by condensing boring meal times and freeing up, literally, thousands of hours for the whole family to enjoy more TikTok. That’s convenience.
Perhaps it’s time that our ubiquitous labour saving devices deserve a little more scrutiny in terms of actual convenience. Granted, you’d have to be a luddite activist to prefer the washboard over the washing machine, although I’m sure a posse from Extinction Washing Machine is scheming to blockade the Whirlpool factory as we speak. Mind you, when the activists from ED (Extinction Dishwasher) turn up at my door I just might let them take the damn thing. I’m sure I spend more time rinsing, stacking and painstakingly salting than I would by simply ‘doing the dishes’ in the first place.
The rush for convenience seems to drive everything as if it’s some sort of divine strategy never to be questioned. I blame the Americans. After WW2 the US teased the world with its ingenuity for technological innovation. They could play golf on the moon, put jacuzzis in the back of limousines and build fridges the size of a terraced house. And boy, we took the bait. Dishwashers, toasters, TVs, blenders and microwaves weren’t just natty tools to lubricate life, they were symbols of the free West!
Eighty years later as the train of progress hurtles along at an ever more perilous pace, we’re left wondering if our only purpose in life is to consume at that same ridiculous rate. The digital age brings us Payface, Facial Recognition Software and CBDCs that silently and invisibly worm their way into our lives as if reaching for a purse was such a terrible inconvenience. Soon a painless retina scan is all we’ll need to pay for the food from the giant vending machine our town centres have become. How convenient!
We all wish Godspeed to the train of progress, of course we do. Technological innovation will solve problems and unlock potential we cannot yet imagine. But the problem with the train of progress is that it’s so obsessed with hurtling towards the horizon it often forgets to pick up human passengers along the way.
Join me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily rantsand light hearted banter
Don’t read this blog. Try AI yourself. Go to OpenAI, sign up to ChatGPT and have some fun. You’ll soon see that it changes everything.
You’ll have read a fair bit about it: how it will make most of us redundant (not true) and how it will transform transport, healthcare and education (true). You will have heard that the digital behemoths (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon) have invested billions in it and you may have briefly dwelt on the potential disruption it’s likely to unleash before going back to your cornflakes. But none of this means anything until you’ve tried it yourself. Like I did.
If you’re an accountant or desk bound lawyer of some sort you’re probably half hoping you’ll be put out to pasture on UBI and craft gin within the next five years. But the future isn’t likely to be that cruel, thankfully.
Like me, you probably thought that AI will take many years before it becomes truly creative. Obviously, we thought smugly, it will solve problems, produce huge reports, create spreadsheets and work alongside Jeff in those vast warehouses, but as for anything creative, it simply cannot understand the human condition. And when it does we’re all shafted anyway, so there’s no point fretting.
We were wrong.
Driving to Heathrow with my son yesterday we messed around with ChatGPT. Obviously, first up we asked it to write a few silly poems and limericks. It answers instantaneously. Some of them were hilarious, largely because the results appear so instantly, rhyme and rhythm intact, you can’t quite believe it’s happening. Next up, I asked it to write me a blog about AI. Here it is. Ok, so it’s a little dry but it would damn well sneak into LinkedIn without looking out of place, that’s a fact.
But our jaw dropping moment came after we asked it to write a poem about Roger a guitar playing squirrel. Within a few short minutes the poem blossomed into a screenplay for an entire musical. The AI suggested movie titles, merchandising ideas, marketing concepts, it wrote all the song titles and lyrics, it proposed the creation of a rival band of forest dwelling musicians, named all the characters, suggested a love interest (Samantha the squirrel) wrote a gentle ballad (to break up all the rockin’ melodies) designed the movie poster, the trailer, the tag line and even food concepts for the squirrel themed cafe in Roger’s theme park. No exaggeration, within twenty minutes we had a complete media franchise. And all this was possible within a month or so of launch. Imagine what it will be capable of in a year, five years, twenty-five years! We surely will not have to wait very long before it can instantly animate the entire musical. At least the credits will be short.
Oh, and if you have any doubts as to its musical talents Open AI has also developed a nifty little thing called Musenet that will write all the songs. Musenet is a bit like a digital Bill Bailey in that it can play Lady Gaga hits in the style of Mozart. Or Mozart hits in the style of Lady Gaga for that matter.
Pop culture, it seems, is pretty easy to emulate. From silly make believe musicals to modern pop ballads AI has decoded so many it innately understands how to construct something that will slip seamlessly into contemporary culture. And therein lies the challenge.
Governments think the answer is to retrain. But anything governments propose to retrain you as is surely already out of date. Others believe we should learn to become programmers, to stay one step ahead of the game. But that’s like learning how to build a typewriter when the computer arrived. No, the answer is staring us in the face.
When culture is so predictable, when films are focus grouped into mediocre uniformity, when music is formatted to homogeneity and when art has grown predictably political to the point of irrelevance then it’s for genuine, creative, living, breathing humans to dig deep and retaliate. The birth of AI is not a marker for surrender or throwing in the towel. AI is the starting pistol for a new wave of mould breaking, non formulaic creativity that celebrates our superiority here on planet Earth. Let the browbeaten retreat into the comfort of their self-made defeat. Human creativity will always push through.
Don’t panic. A genuine renaissance is on the horizon.
Join me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily rantsand light hearted banter
