Cherish not chore, thanks Amazon.

Amazon is doing independent retail a massive favour but you wouldn’t know it because we are constantly reminded that Jeff Bezos and his robot army is coming to crush every retailer in the nation.

I have written in the past about how data, sensors and smart devices are revolutionising our lives and retail. I am a big supporter of technology, I think it is cool. I also think this is a really interesting time and space for retail, and technology is making retail more and more magical. Why wouldn’t we use our smart devices to help us shop? Seamless payments and customer loyalty in store without needing to carry a dozen store cards for a start. Run your retail business with AI. Awesome.

Amazon is very active in the retail of convenience, monitoring our activity and using all this data to get our toilet paper delivered to us, just in time. Amazon’s new chain of Amazon Go grocery stores are making it even easier to pop in and pick up the TP and a salad on the go by using cameras and sensors to track you in store and automatically detect when you pick up the jumbo pack of cloud soft three-ply and charge you $9.95 as you walk out the store.

Alexa makes it trivial to make a shopping list. You can ask it for recipes and Amazon knows what you are making for dinner. So it can suggest you add more baked beans to the next shop.

There is no doubt Amazon is making a big impact in online and convenience retail, and this makes for good headlines about how Amazon is going to kill retail. With drones and robots and Alexa and people-less stores.

But it’s just not true.

The chore of retail is being disrupted

Amazon is disrupting the parts of retail no one likes. The chore. Standing in queues in the grocery store with your jumbo pack of toilet paper and baked beans. New batteries, or cheap bits and bobs you would otherwise buy from dollar stores. Appliances that are exactly the same in every store that sells them, only the price changes. You get all this on Amazon for a deal and they deliver the same day. They are making it quicker to do convenience shopping, and saving you money too and this is the best news for independent retail. We could all sit at home in our underwear unpacking our Amazon boxes and watching Amazon Prime eating Amazon brand baked beans. Never needing to go out. Ever. But that’s not a world I want to live in.

We all have limited time, and limited budgets. Life is busy, we are seemingly working harder even though we are surrounded by technology that was supposed to make it all easier. The emails never stop, our phones are constantly yelling at us. We can work anywhere and everywhere so often we do. We find it hard to turn off. Technology is making us work harder and consume more. It’s almost like they planned it this way. Life is a chore.

But here is what is actually happening, and it’s the future we can all make true. Amazon is saving us and independent retail, whether they know it or not, from ourselves and the world of always on busyness. The fact is Amazon and others are using technology to give us hours back each week from the drudgery of supermarket shopping and the chores of retail no one likes. While they do this that are also saving us real money too. This means we have more time and more free cash to do what we want, if we choose, and to engage in what I call the cherish side of retail. This is the magical side of retail, of exploration, discovery and happenstance. Where you go shopping to discover things to fall in love with and to cherish. To admire the store displays. To switch off for a while. To find a new jacket. You don’t know what style but perhaps a red one will be nice. Spend time with your friends in a coffee shop. Get your hair done. And this, my country people, is how Amazon is doing independent retail a big massive.

Some people will love baked beans and never leaving home but I love the world we live in and I love independent retail and I can’t imagine that ever going away. The more and more Jeff’s robots and AI can automate our lives then the more time we have to go and fall in love with unique stores selling things meant for us to fall in love with and cherish.

So thank you Amazon from me and the millions of independent retailers around the world. We’ll take it from here.