The Worlding Practices of Autonomous Stores

‘Autonomous stores’ are often characterized in the media as the future of shopping: physical environments made smart by augmentation through digital technologies that can process data automatically, seamlessly, and without the need for workers, identifying both consumers and their actions. References to autonomy and automation conjure a set of imaginaries of technology in the service of consumption and progress: for consumers these novel environments are purported to mean gains in convenience, whereby saving time is saving money. For retailers, they mean the possibility of gathering significant amounts of information on the behaviour of customers in a store environment, thus being another manifestation of what Zuboff (2019) calls ‘Surveillance Capitalism’.

Despite being hailed as autonomous, these spaces are vast digital assemblages that rely upon networked infrastructures composed of people, knowledges, values and numerous technological entities (such as, AI, sensors, algorithms, computer vision, cameras). Departing from the premise that “technology is society made durable” (Latour 1990), this paper draws upon 17 semi-structured interviews conducted with three Portuguese corporations – Sensei (a startup tech developer of autonomous stores), Continente (large food retailer) and Galp (large oil and gas retailer) – who are collaborating in the development and implementation of autonomous stores in the Portuguese context, to examine the discourses and practices that drive, justify and sustain their collaborations.

We pay particular attention to the discourses through which they are built: Who is pushing for them? Why? What are the main issues that are being discussed both in terms of advantages and problems? Who is included/excluded? And, finally, what futures are being built? This will then allow us to shed light on the concepts that underlie these spaces – What are “autonomy” and “smartness” in autonomous stores?