Dr Jake Monk Kydd reflects on the potential of shopping via drones while shopping centres face further closures.

There is an endless graveyard for great ideas and new tech that for some reason just didn’t catch the public’s imagination.  Some readers will recall Amstrad’s E-mailer, Sinclair’s C5 battery car, and even Apple’s ‘Lisa’ computer which all failed despite a combination of ingenious ideas and impressive development budgets. It would be fair to say though that many other ideas that were written off went on to great success such as James Dyson’s vacuum cleaner. But what about how we buy and where we buy?

With Retail the trends here blend elements of human wants and needs making this problematic to correctly predict. In part the issue is exacerbated by the enormous sums of money involved in this huge, mainstay industry. With Amazon now trialling delivering orders in the UK via drones the retail industry will be watching closely to see if this idea will really take off, or perhaps like one of their delivery drones in Texas earlier this year simply crash and burn.

As has been commented on here, and widely throughout the media, the traditional High Street has been under pressure for many years. So many towns have seen their once thriving retail areas decline and this has spread to out-of-town shopping centres too.

In the UK the first distinct shopping centre, or mall, in Brent Cross opened with great fanfare in 1976. With the then Prince Charles cutting the ribbon the event was widely covered and a novel, and for many an exciting, new way to shop had arrived. The UK had lagged behind the USA by twenty years with the concept of malls but growing car ownership and an increase in disposable spending had finally arrived fuelling their popularity. For many the call of the mall was irresistible.

Fifty years later though and the retail sector has undergone changes that the mall pioneers could never have foreseen. In the USA over 25% of malls have closed with many others facing repurposing or demolition. A similar fate is threatening the malls in the UK too. No longer is the mall regarded as the place to meet for people, although many malls have adapted to offer a range of activities from fairground rides to cinemas to aquariums and more, to lure in customers to do things instead of just buying things.  Shopping and interacting with people for many though has shifted to being online, leaving countless retailers in expensive mall locations short of footfall.

In February this year an Amazon drone crashed into an apartment building in a Dallas suburb. This drone was a Mark 30 machine which highlights the huge amount of work and money that Amazon have committed to this project to have developed that many prototypes. Money and good intentions though will count for little if the buying public aren’t onboard, something that Sinclair, Amstrad and even Apple can attest. In the meantime, the malls will need to continue to adapt as appealing destinations for shopping doing things, and meeting people in order to stay relevant and stay open.

Dr Jake Monk Kydd is Visiting Senior Lecturer in the School of Business, Law, and Policing.