Main street shopping strips have had a hard time over the past forty years as supermarkets and big box stores have steadily drained customers away, however the new wave of retail, manufacturing and logistics technologies may be an opportunity to revitalise them.
A good example of shopping strips using new technologies is London’s Regent Street with its smart shopping app that integrates with iBeacon location devices, the website Contactless Intelligence reports how shopkeepers, landlords and the local authorites are rolling out an initiative as part of a £1 billion regeneration project.
London’s Regent Street is a fairly unique mainstreet in that it’s extremely upmarket which gives it a lot of advantages over most neighbourhoods, but it does point the way for how other shopping strips can use new technologies to reinvent themselves.