As online shopping is growing, so are the supermarkets' giant warehouses – with their robots and "goods-to-person pickstations". Will all grocery shopping one day be done this way?
Do you remember what the future of shopping used to be? In place of a trundle round the high street every few days, we were going to make weekly trips to big-box supermarkets outside town, delight in the bright produce and the enticing smells and drive home happy, our cars low on their axles. Well, there's a new future now: the "dark store", the supermarket that we never see at all.
Don't be too alarmed by the name, or too excited. Desynchronise your watches. A dark store is just a warehouse full of groceries where staff called "pickers" select the goods that have been ordered by an online customer. Sometimes they look almost creepily similar to normal supermarkets. In Hanger Lane, west London, Waitrose operates a dark store in an old John Lewis carpet warehouse.Inside, professional pickers roll baskets around the aisles much like civilians, except they are wrapped up in coats and scarves against the refrigeration system.
Elsewhere, they look like nothing you've ever seen. At Tesco's sixth and newest dark store in Erith, south-east London , they operate what is basically a giant robot butler, although they call it a "goods-to-person pickstation" and a "dotcom centre" (the supermarkets themselves aren't keen on the term "dark store").Instead of laying out the groceries in aisles, at Erith they store most of them more efficiently in towers of blue crates. The robot extracts whatever is needed and brings it to the picker, who stands still (until it's time to visit the freezer).
"It's a little bit like I imagine going into a Willy Wonka factory," says Jennifer Creevy, deputy editor of Retail Week. "It looks really whizzy and there's crates moving around. It's really impressive." Organising things this way saves space and time, and creates a safer workplace, according to Dematic , the company that built Tesco's robots. "With its ergonomic design, you get 100% golden zone single-level picking," they say. And who are we to argue?
No one knows how much of our grocery shopping will eventually be done online, but everyone agrees it will be a lot more than now. In 2013, the proportion was about 5.5%. This year it should be around 6%. Within five years the value of the market is expected to double in size. Much of the current online demand is met by simply sending pickers around conventional supermarkets, although as demand rises that becomes less efficient, in part because the physically present customers keep getting in the way. Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Waitrose all have plans to open new dark stores over the coming year or two. "It just makes sense," Creevy says. "Online is just showing huge, huge growth.Online and convenience stores."
So in future, when people are doing all their boring and heavy shopping through dark stores, and all their interesting and urgent shopping through convenience stores and local shops, what is going to become of the big boxes? Tesco has already turned one in Watford into something more like a shopping mall , with a cafe, a clothes shop, a restaurant and even a community centre. It's hard to imagine that strategy always working, however, since shopping malls already exist. And that may be no bad thing. Perhaps in 20 years you'll be out in the countryside and you'll be able to say to your bored grandchildren: "I remember when all this was car parks."
Source: The Guardian (http://goo.gl/5wgWl1)
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