Retail

The comforting story about automation is the one that lets us stop thinking.

21 October 2026

The most seductive idea in robotics this week is a sentence rather than a machine: the robots are leaving, and automation will hand us back our humanity. It is written warmly, argued confidently, and beside the point.

It comes from a Forbes author post by a technology founder at the natural-language firm Arria, who says he does not buy the AI doomsday hype. His case is the old reassurance in new clothing. History shows automation changes the nature of work rather than the rate of unemployment, earlier waves freed our bodies from physical labour, and now language technology will free our minds from the robotic mental grind.

The argument is appealing, and it asks you to take a lot on trust.

Other voices this fortnight are far less soothing, and they are better sourced. Research published by Anthropic on 30 September, reported by India Today, found that large language models and robots could potentially perform tasks accounting for around 81 percent of working time in the US economy. The same research adds the caveat the reassurance crowd skips: current robots remain expensive and limited in the physical world, with nursing and general repair less exposed than driving and warehouse work. Being able to do a task does not mean replacing the worker. Even so, 81 percent of working time is not a rounding error you can wave away with a word like humanity.

This matters to anyone who runs a business rather than writes about one. The claim that automation only changes the nature of work is true in the long aggregate and brutal in the particular. The truck driver displaced in year one gets no comfort from a prompt engineer being hired in year five. The economist James Pethokoukis, in his AEI essay on robot trucks, points out that the panic over self-driving vehicles displacing drivers is now more than a decade old, and the fleet of unmanned lorries has not arrived on schedule. So the timing is slow, the dislocation is real, and the people reassuring you tend to be the ones selling the software.

The founder arguing that automation returns us to our humanity sells automation. The vision of work made optional, of abundance for all, is offered most loudly by the people who own the machines, and none of them discloses the gap between the promise and the interest. Nobody in these pieces explains who captures the value that 80 percent of working time represents, or how it reaches the person whose job it displaced. That question about distribution is the whole argument, and the brochure leaves it out.

Zoho’s founder Sridhar Vembu, quoted in the same India Today piece, at least names it. He calls universal basic income an “unimaginative and dystopian vision,” and argues instead for livelihoods in nature, nurture, culture and scripture: restoring soil, raising children, caring for the old, making music. You need not agree to respect the move. He is asking what humans are for when production gets cheap, while the leaving story assumes the answer sorts itself out.

What to watch. For retail and brands, the practical read is to plan around neither the comforting timeline nor the frightening one. Plan around the Anthropic distinction: tasks fall faster than occupations. The jobs your customers trust a human to do, the ones with touch, judgement and care, are the last to go and the first to command a premium. The brand that automates the drudgery and visibly keeps the humanity will win the shopper. The brand that automates the humanity and keeps the drudgery will lose her.

The Roth Read. When someone tells you the robots are leaving and your humanity is coming back, ask who gets the money the robots made on the way out. If the person reassuring you also sells the software, you are reading a sales deck. Check who funds the next wave of “automation sets us free” essays, and read the disclosure line before the headline. Automate the drudgery, guard the human touch your customers pay for, and never let a pretty sentence do your planning for you.

BYD drew a robot. The drawing you should study is the dealership floor.

15 October 2026

BYD filed a design patent this week, and the drawing matters less than where BYD says the robot will go.

On 9 October, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration published an “Embodied AI Robot” design patent with BYD as the holder, according to CarNewsChina and Star News Korea. The drawings show a black-and-white humanoid with a rounded, screenless head and jointed torso, arms and legs, designed to walk, balance and interact with people. It looks very like “Xiao Di”, a robot a BYD executive teased on social media earlier this year. Figures disclosed earlier put Xiao Di at 1.61 metres and 58.5 kilos, with 31 degrees of freedom and a hand accurate to plus or minus one millimetre. BYD has not confirmed that the patent shows the production model.

Most carmakers now have a humanoid in a slide deck. BYD has also said where its one will work. According to CarNewsChina, its executives plan to deploy these robots across the company’s own dealership network, to greet customers, explain the cars and demonstrate the in-car infotainment. They are meant for the showroom, not the factory.

That makes this a retail story. For twenty years the dealership has been the weak link for premium car brands. Service varies from one site to the next, and a carefully built brand can be undersold by whoever happens to be on the floor that Saturday. BYD wants to automate the one role no carmaker has ever controlled: a salesperson who never has an off day, never improvises the pitch, never forgets the script, and demonstrates the infotainment the same way in Shenzhen as in Stuttgart. The robot is the headline. The bigger change is brand control reaching the last metre of the sale, the one part the brand has never owned.

China matters here because of how BYD builds. It is the world’s largest integrated maker of electric vehicles, and it is making this robot the way it makes everything else: in-house, at scale and from its own parts. It set up a dedicated robotics team in 2022, invested in AgiBot in 2023 and took a stake in Percibot in 2025. It has also been running Ubtech’s Walker S1 inside its own Changsha plant to collect operating data. BYD already makes the batteries, motors and actuators and runs the factory floor, so the robot is simply the next product down the same line. A Western carmaker partners with a robotics firm and negotiates over the margin. BYD owns both sides of that deal, and Western boards keep underestimating what that is worth.

There is reason for caution. A design patent is a drawing. There is no price, no reliability data and no deployment date, and Xiao Di may never get beyond the teaser video. A hand accurate to a millimetre still has to survive a showroom full of children and spilled coffee. So far BYD has shown renders and no revenue, and scepticism is fair.

The intent is still clear. BYD wants to know whether a humanoid can be the brand’s own face in the room where the sale happens. That is a far more commercial question than whether one can work in a warehouse, and almost no Western retailer or carmaker is seriously asking it yet.

What to watch. See whether BYD puts one of these robots on a dealership floor before it puts one in a factory. The order of deployment will show what BYD thinks the robot is for. If customers meet it first, BYD is selling brand control rather than cost savings, and that is the version retail executives should worry about.

The Roth Read. Picture the robot on your own shop floor, in your uniform, saying your words every time, without fail. BYD has said its humanoid belongs where the customer decides, in the showroom. If your brand still treats the last metre of the sale as somebody else’s problem, BYD is about to show you what that assumption costs.

America shut the door on the robot. Berlin propped it open. Now Europe has to choose.

9 September 2026

The most interesting thing at IFA Berlin this week is not a robot. It is a legal document, three thousand miles away, that decided which robots you will be allowed to buy.

On the show floor at Messe Berlin, Chinese humanoid makers arrived in force. MagicLab, a Suzhou company founded in January 2024, opened its first major European trade show with the MagicBot X1, a 31-degree-of-freedom humanoid standing 180cm tall, and reports on its own unaudited figures more than 12,000 units shipped and an order book above RMB 1.1 billion, roughly £120 million. Galbot ran a fully autonomous store from Booth 160. Zeroth showed off the W1, a tracked home robot that carries 110 pounds. All real, all working, all drawing the longest stares in Hall 25.

And all, as of five weeks ago, barred from the United States. On 28 July the US Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced robots to its Covered List, classifying any mobile robot over 4.4 pounds that senses, connects and navigates as posing, in the FCC’s words, “an unacceptable risk to US national security.” The definition, as K&L Gates set out on 3 August, catches nearly every machine on that Berlin runway. Washington shut the door. The TechTimes coverage notes more than 930 Chinese companies have pivoted toward Europe in the wake of it.

So here is the thing worth saying plainly. America did not make a technology decision. It made a data decision. The robots are excellent. The question the FCC asked was not “can it fetch the item from the shelf” but “where does what it sees go next.” A humanoid working a pharmacy shift or patrolling a home is a sensor package on legs: cameras, microphones, a floorplan of your store, a map of your customers’ movements, a feed uploaded to a cloud. And China’s National Intelligence Law obliges Chinese firms to assist state intelligence work when asked. That obligation travels with the device, GDPR or no GDPR.

This is the retail read, and it is uncomfortable. The store estate is about to fill with autonomous machines, and the best ones, on price and capability, are Chinese. A retailer weighing a fleet of shelf-scanners or greeters is no longer just buying labour. It is buying a data posture. Every aisle those robots walk becomes a question about who else, ultimately, can see it. That is a boardroom conversation, not a procurement one, and most boards have not had it.

The China lesson here is not the scare. It is the speed. Washington’s ban did not slow these firms; it rerouted them, and within weeks they were on a Berlin catwalk. That is the structural advantage the West keeps underrating: manufacturing scale and iteration velocity that turn a closed market into a redirected one overnight. While Brussels debates a framework, Suzhou books a booth. One vendor, AiMOGA, has already cleared the EU’s EN 18031 standard, certified by TÜV Rheinland. The compliant path exists. Most exhibitors simply have not walked it yet.

Which leaves Europe with the decision America has taken off its own table. Copy the ban and lose access to the best hardware on the market. Wave everyone through and inherit the exposure. Or do the harder thing: build the standard, insist on it, and buy on proof rather than fear.

What to watch. Watch certification, not spectacle. The number that matters over the next year is not units shipped or backflips performed. It is how many of these machines carry an independently verified European compliance credential. That badge, dull as it sounds, is about to become the most valuable thing a robot can wear onto a Western shop floor.

The Roth Read. If you are putting robots in your stores, stop asking what they can do and start asking where what they see goes. Insist on a data layer of your own or an independent one that does not leave your jurisdiction. The demo will dazzle you; the data flow is the deal. Buy the robot that can prove its answer, not the one that gives the best show, because your customers will not forgive you for the map you handed away.

Ten robots, ten days, one hour of your time. Book the ROI session before the demo dazzles you.

25 August 2026

A show is coming to Chelsea. Not a trade stand, not a keynote, but ten commercial robots running live for ten days, and the most interesting word in the whole pitch is not robot. It is ROI.

Robot Week runs from 7 to 18 September in Chelsea, London, staged by a firm posting the details on TikTok lecrobotics. Ten commercial robots, running live, two days each across facilities management, logistics, retail, hospitality, healthcare and care. Live demos, operational run-throughs, and, tellingly, ROI sessions you can book for a free hour. Not a spectacle. A shortlist.

Hold that against the other robot news of the season. In Beijing, as the BBC reported, the second World Humanoid Games saw a machine run the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt’s world record, a droid perform Ronaldo’s Siuuu, and robots box, high-jump and play table tennis. It is genuinely impressive and it is entertainment. Compare the Julia Charles event agency, which rents eight-foot robots that display your logo on an iPad chest and do a pre-recorded routine. Two ends of one market: the robot as marvel, the robot as marketing prop.

Robot Week is neither, and that is why retail should pay attention. The headline everywhere is the robot that can dance. The story in Chelsea is the robot that can be costed.

Here is why it matters for anyone who runs a store or a supply chain. For three years the robotics conversation aimed at retail has been a highlight reel. A machine folds a shirt in a lab. A humanoid pours a drink at a show. Everyone films it, nobody buys it, because a demo answers the wrong question. The demo asks can it do this. The buyer asks what does it cost me per shift, who fixes it at 2am, and what does it do to my payroll and my insurance. An event built around operational run-throughs and ROI sessions is quietly admitting that the marvel phase is over and the procurement phase has begun.

We already have the proof point at scale. Tesco has signed a deal to roll cleaning robots across 600 stores, as reported this season. That is not a demo. That is a purchase order, a maintenance contract, a line in a capital budget. The gap between a robot that goes viral and a robot that gets bought is the gap between a WAIC showreel and a Tesco rollout, and it is the only gap that pays anyone’s wages.

So when a shortlist of ten machines shows up in Chelsea offering an hour of your time to talk return, treat it as a signal about where the market has moved. The buyers have stopped clapping. They have started asking for the spreadsheet. That is the healthiest thing to happen to retail robotics in years, because a machine you can cost is a machine you can actually deploy, and a machine you can deploy is one a competitor can deploy against you.

One word of caution worth carrying into that free hour. An ROI session is a sales session with better manners. The number a vendor hands you is their number, built on their assumptions about your labour cost, your uptime, your footfall. Bring your own. The operator who walks in with their real cost per hour and their real shrink figure controls the conversation. The one who walks in to be impressed walks out having bought a mascot.

What to watch. Watch which lanes fill their booking slots. If facilities management and logistics sell out and retail lags, that tells you where the honest ROI lives right now: in the back of house, not the shop floor. The robots that pay for themselves first are the ones the shopper never sees.

The Roth Read. Stop asking whether the robot is impressive. Start asking what it costs you per shift and who answers the phone when it breaks. Book the hour, bring your own numbers, and remember that the vendor who leads with the spreadsheet respects you more than the one who leads with the dance.

The demo screws in the lightbulb. Someone had to change 100,000 hours of them first.

18 August 2026

The videos are irresistible. A humanoid ties a knot, screws in a bulb, teams up with a second robot to tidy a room. A different machine opens a bag of Funyuns and plays Xbox. The dream of the domestic servant, we are told, has arrived. It has not. And the reason it has not is the more interesting story.

Last week Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a vision-language-action model it says can control an entire humanoid body, adapt to unfamiliar tasks, and let two robots divide labour between them. The Silicon Valley startup 1X pushed its own demo of its Neo robot doing chores. And a YouTube maker who spent three days at MIT with actual roboticists came back with a blunt verdict: the hype is worse than you think. The lab, he found, is a long way from the reel.

Here is the tell, and it did not come from a Californian marketing team. It came from Beijing. Xiaomi quietly published the workings behind Xiaomi-Robotics-1, and the numbers are the honest part. To teach a policy model the rudiments of manipulation, they pre-trained on 100,000 hours of what they call embodiment-free trajectories across more than 1,700 scenarios, then post-trained on over 7,200 hours of real-robot data gathered in real homes: tidying a sofa, sorting a shoe cabinet, putting away kitchenware. Read that again. Seven thousand hours of humans teaching a machine to put a mug away, and it is still a research paper, not a product.

That is why the demo and the deployment are two different countries. The headline is the robot screwing in the bulb. The story is the data barrier Xiaomi names in its own first line: language and vision models scaled because the internet handed them oceans of text and images for free. Robotics has no such ocean. Every hour of dexterity has to be paid for, one careful human demonstration at a time. Scarcity, Xiaomi says plainly, is what has capped the field. Not imagination. Not compute. Data.

For anyone in retail or brand, this reframes the whole timetable. The question is not whether a humanoid will one day restock your shelf or fold your returns. It is who is quietly funding the ten thousand boring hours that make it possible, and what they will own at the end. A demo is marketing. A trained policy that works in a real, messy, badly-lit store is an asset, and assets accrue to whoever paid for the data. If you are waiting to buy the finished robot, you have already ceded the valuable part to the firm that logged the hours.

And note where the honest accounting is coming from. The West released the seductive video. Xiaomi released the methodology, the scenario count, the hours. That is not modesty. It is confidence. When you show your working, you are telling rivals you have already done the expensive, unglamorous part and you are not afraid of them seeing how. While Western commentary argued about whether the DeepMind reel was real, a Chinese consumer-electronics giant published the boring receipts that actually move the field forward.

What to watch. Ignore the next viral clip of a robot doing something charming with its hands. Watch instead for who publishes hours of training data and where it was gathered. Homes, warehouses, shop floors: the location of the data is the location of the future deployment. The firm collecting kitchen hours today is telling you where its robot will live tomorrow.

The Roth Read. Stop being impressed by the lightbulb. Start asking who paid for the hundred thousand hours behind it, because that invoice is the real balance sheet of this industry. If a robot ever tidies your store, it will not be because someone had a clever demo. It will be because someone, most likely in Shenzhen, was willing to be bored for longer than you were.

The robot you never see is the one already picking your order

11 August 2026

Ask people what a robot looks like and they picture a face, two legs, a hand that waves. The robot that actually touches your life has none of those. It is a squat orange trolley in a warehouse in eastern China, and it has probably already handled something you ordered this week.

The BBC went inside a facility run by Geek+, which it describes as the world’s largest supplier of autonomous mobile warehouse robots. The pictures are undramatic on purpose: fleets of low, flat machines gliding under shelves, lifting them, carrying the whole rack to a human who picks the item and sends it on. A company executive put the honest part plainly. The early challenge, he said, was getting customers to believe such robots could create real value. That belief problem is now solved. The market has moved from proving the idea to buying it at scale.

Here is why that matters more than any humanoid demo you saw this month. The debate about robots and work keeps staging itself as a confrontation: the machine that walks in and takes the job. That is the wrong picture. The real displacement does not arrive on two legs and announce itself. It arrives as a floor plan. It arrives as a warehouse redesigned around the machine, where the human is no longer the picker but the exception the machine defers to, the pair of hands that handles what the shelf-carrier cannot. The work does not vanish. It is quietly rewritten, and the terms of the rewrite are set by whoever supplies the robots.

Right now, increasingly, that is China. Not because of some sudden leap in cleverness, but for reasons that are structural and dull and therefore durable. China builds the motors, the batteries and the chassis at a cost and speed no one else matches, and it deploys at a scale that turns every warehouse into a live test bed. Geek+ did not win the global warehouse by inventing a wheel. It won by iterating faster, shipping cheaper, and running more robots in more buildings than anyone else, until the learning compounded. While the West argued about whether automation was ethical, the fulfilment centre behind your Saturday delivery was quietly being run from Suzhou.

For anyone who runs a retail operation, this is the uncomfortable truth beneath the humanoid theatre. The efficiency that lets a rival undercut you on delivery speed and price is not visible on the shop floor and not printed on the box. It is upstream, in a building you will never tour, powered by machines you did not choose and cannot easily match. Your customer feels only the outcome: it came faster, it cost less. They will never know a robot did it, and they will not care. That is precisely the point. The most consequential robot is the one that has been designed to disappear.

And the jobs question deserves better than the two lazy answers. It is not the robot apocalypse, and it is not the comforting line that new work always appears. It is a redistribution of who holds the skill and who holds the leverage. The warehouse worker becomes a supervisor of throughput, faster to train and easier to replace, while the value migrates to the software and the supplier. A society that wants good work out of this has to fight for it deliberately. It will not fall out of the machine on its own.

What to watch. Watch the gap between the robots we photograph and the robots we buy. The humanoids get the headlines and the funding rounds; the wheeled workhorses get the contracts. When a Western retailer announces a fulfilment upgrade this year, read the fine print for whose robots are inside. The name on the invoice is the real story.

The Roth Read. Stop watching the robot that waves. Watch the one that hides. If the efficiency that beats you on price and speed is built into a warehouse you have never seen, running on machines from a supplier you never chose, then your competitive edge is already being set by someone else’s floor plan, and you should decide today whether you are going to own that layer or rent it.

Forget the backflips. China is teaching robots to clock in.

6 August 2026

For years the story from China’s robotics labs came with a soundtrack: a whir of servos, a crowd gasping, a humanoid landing a backflip. Impressive. Also beside the point. The signal this week is quieter and far more consequential. In an underground lab in Beijing, and on a training floor in Hefei, China has stopped asking whether its robots can dance. It is asking whether they can work.

A Chinese robotics firm, Gaobot, put the case plainly to camera this week: for decades industrial robots have done one thing, thousands of times, on a fixed program. Bolt here. Weld there. Repeat. What China now wants is a machine that can handle the mess of a real factory, the odd angle, the dropped part, the job nobody bothered to write a routine for. On 6 August, at a pre-training ground for embodied intelligence in Hefei, 83 robots from different companies were put through more than thirty replicated real-world scenes: the home, the shop floor, the warehouse. Not a demo. A rehearsal for employment.

The numbers behind this are not modest. IDC expects China’s spending on embodied intelligence to climb from 1.4 billion US dollars to 77 billion over five years, a compound growth rate near 94 per cent. Embodied AI has, for the first time, been written into the national government work report. Unitree, which shipped 5,500 humanoids last year, more than anyone on earth, has filed to go public. The language coming out of the sector is telling: 2026 is being called the year of mass-production commercialisation, the year the work leaves the lab.

Here is why a retailer should read this over their coffee, not skim past it. The West has spent this year debating the humanoid as spectacle and as threat: will it take my job, can it fold my laundry, is it safe. China has quietly reframed the question as a supply-chain one. A machine that follows a fixed program is a tool. A machine that learns a new task from watching, that adapts to a scene it has not seen, is closer to labour. And labour, unlike tooling, scales into every corner of an economy: the stockroom, the loading bay, the shop floor at closing time.

Notice, too, where these robots are being sold. Unitree and AgiBot are not just filing IPOs; they are opening shops. A flagship store in Beijing. An Agibot deployment inside a JD MALL in Shanghai, fitted out as a retail complex, around five million yuan of investment in a single store. The West imagines robots arriving through the factory door. China is building the retail entrance first, letting the public meet the machine over the counter, where familiarity, and demand, are made. Dobot has gone further still, launching a humanoid pitched at the young family and the home.

The mechanism matters, and it is not magic. China’s edge is structural: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the assembly lines sit inside the same borders as the labs. When the New Yorker’s Kai-Fu Lee says the two countries are now “two different universes,” this is the concrete meaning of it. One universe is arguing about what the robot might mean. The other is collecting the training data, thirty scenes at a time, and pricing the shelf space.

What to watch. Watch the training grounds, not the trade shows. WAIC gives you the polished demo; the Hefei data-collection floor gives you the roadmap. When a single site is running 83 robots across warehouse, shop and home scenes, the next headline is not a better backflip. It is a purchase order.

The Roth Read. Stop watching Chinese robots for the trick and start watching them for the task. If your competitor’s stockroom is being rehearsed on a training floor in Hefei this year, you do not have a technology question, you have a cost-base question, and it is already being answered without you. The West is grading these machines on whether they can amaze us. China is grading them on whether they can be hired.

China is not automating the shop. It is automating the welcome.

3 August 2026

A robot that stacks a shelf is a warehouse story. A robot that greets you, checks you in, pours your coffee and remembers your name is a brand story. China has quietly stopped building the first and started shipping the second.

The signal this week is not one launch but a pattern. Reports out of Shenzhen, amplified across social feeds, describe AI-powered service robots spreading fast through Chinese hotels, restaurants, healthcare, logistics and retail, with businesses treating automation less as a cost cut and more as a growth line. It rhymes with what else crossed the wire today: a 24-hour convenience store in Hong Kong staffed by a single robot that stocks, picks and rings you up, and a state council official confirming China now builds over half the world’s humanoid robots. The context is not incidental. It is the whole point.

What happened, tightly: the machines have moved out of the loading bay and onto the shop floor, the reception desk, the ward. They are no longer hidden infrastructure. They are the face a customer meets.

Here is why that should hold a retailer’s attention longer than any spec sheet. For thirty years we have told ourselves that the human touch is the last thing automation cannot take. The smile at the door, the recommendation from someone who knows the range, the small grace of being recognised. That was the moat. China is now testing, at national scale and in public, whether the moat was ever as deep as we claimed. When a robot checks you into a Chengdu hotel and it is faster, cheaper and unfailingly polite, the shopper does not file a complaint about the death of hospitality. The shopper checks in.

That is the uncomfortable read. The threat to Western retail was never that robots would out-lift us. It is that they might out-serve us, in exactly the moments we sold as irreplaceably human. And the reason China gets to run this experiment first is structural, not magical. It controls the supply chain that makes the hardware cheap, the motors, the batteries, the sensors. It has the manufacturing density to iterate a service robot through ten generations while a Western firm is still costing the first. And it has a culture and a regulator willing to put the thing in front of a real customer and learn in daylight. While we convened panels on the ethics of the robot host, they booked ten thousand of them into hotels.

The brand question this raises is sharper than efficiency. It is about what your welcome means. If a robot can deliver competent service, then competent service is no longer a differentiator, it is table stakes, available to every rival at the price of a subscription. What remains scarce is the thing a machine cannot yet counterfeit: judgement, warmth that reads the room, the member of staff who breaks the script because they can see you are having a bad day. That is not a reason to keep humans on the floor out of sentiment. It is a reason to redeploy them to the moments that actually move a shopper, and let the machine take the rest.

What to watch. Watch whether the Chinese service robot travels. The convenience-store test in Hong Kong is the tell, because Hong Kong is where mainland deployment meets international retail standards and demanding, cosmopolitan shoppers. If it works there, the export case writes itself, and the first Western chains to license it will not announce it as automation. They will announce it as service.

The Roth Read. Stop asking whether a robot can do your staff’s job. Ask which two minutes of your customer’s visit are so human that no machine should touch them, and whether your people are spending their day there or wasting it on the work a robot should already own. Get that wrong and you will automate the wrong half of the welcome, keeping the queue and losing the smile.

A Change of Pace – Trend 3

12 February 2016

The Bund Shanghai

As China and the businesses that operate within it adjust to a slower pace of economic growth, the Year of the Monkey will be a crucial one; those with strong products and strong brands stand to do well. Others are likely to fall by the wayside. Legendary investor Warren Buffett says that when the tide goes out, you can see who’s been swimming naked. In China right now, there will be more than a few c-suites where managers are wishing they had a towel handy. This is a market that may be delivering sluggish growth in comparison to the rates we’ve grown accustomed to in China – but it is still growing.

Now, however, that slower growth, coupled with volatility on the stock markets, means there is pressure on consumer confidence and spending, and that means only the strongest brands will now benefit from China’s growth. This year, we believe, will see a shake-out; for the businesses that have invested in their brand during times of fast growth, and which have built a relationship with consumers, this could well be beneficial, as competitors that have cluttered their category struggle and disappear. For those who have not yet earned a place in consumers’ hearts and minds, the coming year will be an enormous challenge.

The History Of Retail In 100 Objects – Paper Money

11 March 2014

Paper Money

It’s Tuesday so it’s The History Of Retail In 100 Objects post – This weeks object is Paper Money

The earliest paper money was used in China around 1000 BC and it was most commonly used as a letter of credit, transferred over large distances. the 13th Cent ury, when Ghengis Khan conquered China, he quickly grasped the potential of its paper money and began using it as a currency throughout his empire. He seized people’s existing supplies of gold and silver and gave them paper currency in exchange, leaving the population no opt ion but to trade with paper money. Although the use of paper money spread and continued for several hundred years, it was not wholeheartedly embraced. In Persia, its introduction in 1294 led to a complete collapse of trade. In the 15th century in China, the issuing of paper notes was mismanaged, leading to rapid depreciation of their value and causing inflation. As a consequence, the use of paper money in China ceased in 1455 and did not resume for many years. Europe came far behind Asia and the Arab world in its adoption of paper money, primarily because Europe didn’t have paper until around 1100 AD. The alleged first instance of use of paper money in Europe was in Spain in 1438 during a Moorish invasion (a Spanish military leader paid his soldiers with paper). Early on in the introduction of paper money, European governments took over its production and began printing ‘official’ paper money. These paper receipts were all given fixed values and people began leaving their heavy coins with merchants in exchange for them. The earliest known English goldsmith certificates were being used by 1633 as proof of ability to pay. Nations and colonies developed their own paper money, leading to the variety of notes in use today. In 1816, governments established the ‘gold standard’, to ward against inflation. This tied the value of paper money to a specific amount of gold, held in the government treasuries. The US officially adopted the gold standard in 1900. Today, not all notes are widely accepted and the average lifespan for a currency’s circulation is only 39 years. The longest running paper currencies are the British pound, (introduced in 1694) and the US dollar (introduced in 1792).

Contribution to Retail History

Paper money is a promise to ‘pay the bearer’ a set amount and as such its success as a currency depends on mutual confidence in its validity (unlike early coins which had an intrinsic face value of their own). It was pivotal to the opening of trade between regions and nations, offering a light, easily portable alternative to the cumbersome weight of coins.

The History Of Retail In 100 Objects Is Available As A Free Podcast

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