Unsolicited, free-to-steal idea dept.: I think there's a non-zero market (in some markets) to charge/invite customers to shop outside NBH / even shutdown 24/7 store temporarily for the right $$$$. I, for one, hate shopping with huge, slow crowds... I'll go somewhere else and/or only go during low-traffic hours. Btw, Costco (and what was PriceClub) used to do this (eg early hours) for commercial and executive customers... (oddly, IDKW I haven't downgraded to Basic given there's almost no advantage to Executive these days.) Apple, although upmarket extreme, also does this for shopping and training.
Also, wish large chains would trial Amazon Go-style cashierless checkout, but perhaps adding a paper receipt for legacy interop/loss prevention/audit. All kinds of great, reusable data could be had with ML/CV with real-time, total product awareness. Lots-and-lots of cameras, networking and datacenter floorspace... but likely worth the investment. AI tallying up what was taken as-it-goes saves a great deal of human effort and customer time, basically an inevitable modality.
EDIT: Maybe in the future, we won't even need stores when/if drones can bring things around to try out/handle returns/prevent loss. Can picture drones from multiple vendors jostling to sell competing product, getting angry with each other and undercutting pricing of each other in real-time. Perhaps even drones carrying flowers / selling "Rolex'es" on a train.
Wal-Mart does use IT to improve the flow of inventory, but also to improve our interactions with shoppers, employees, and the communities that the stores are based in.
We recently just had an internal hackathon, of which there was everything from AI to complete redesigns of our business model. I guarantee that one of those will become a full project withing the walls.
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