NRF has come a long way since its early days in the ballroom of the New York Hilton. Retail’s Big Show now spans the entire retail technology universe. One exciting highlight was Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, visiting the show this year to give a keynote presentation on how to keep a brand fresh in the 21st century.
With an ever increasing number of attendees, 2017 reached 35,000 this year, with roughly 30% being international. 2017 also proved remarkable for APG Cash Drawer with a record breaking number of booth visitors keeping the team busy and on its toes for three days.
With the entire industry a-buzz around e-payments and mobile wallets, cash management was a special point of interest among leading retailers and industry experts at the APG booth. Cash continues to represent 30 to 40% of all retail transactions. Therefore cash handling remains a challenge in bricks and mortar. APG’s SMARTtill® Cash Management Solution when integrated with CCTV, Smart Safes and data mining tools, becomes a powerful loss prevention and labor solution for the PoS.
Also present at NRF was the continuing trend towards tablet based PoS. This movement towards mobility is being brought about by millennials who are used to getting information instantly online and customers now expect the same service in-store. APG is able to address this trend with its NetPRO® Interface and BluePRO® Device solutions which exhibit how to operate a cash drawer from a PoS running on an Apple or Microsoft tablet via Bluetooth, USB, Wi-Fi or Ethernet to increase customer interaction.
Also on display in the APG booth was NRF’s widest range of cash drawers designed for the traditional PoS market. These drawers ranged from General Application & Bespoke to Integration & Mobile technologies, highlighting APG’s unique core capabilities as well as its desire to strive for innovation to fulfill the needs of modern shoppers.
The Innovation Lab at NRF showed us what lies ahead in retail technology with a focus on 3D printing, AI, AR/VR, robotics, smart technology and wearable’s:
A humanoid robot from OPOS-J that you can communicate with and order food from in a hospitality environment. It moves around the physical store and interacts with customers through voice
Ultra-realistic and customized Virtual Reality Store Software from InVRison that takes you to an aisle in a store where the products you select to buy are picked up for you and shown on your computer screen, as if you were physically in the shop.
A shopping trolley-mounted tablet for targeted digital advertising and automated check-out (put in the cart and go). When these trolleys are equipped with special sensor technology and quality cameras, it enables automated stock-checking and alerts, all unnoticeable while the customer is shopping and without staff time being used.
The list of clever and new technologies carries on. Being able to tell what the future of retail will look like, both on-line and in-store, is not easy, but NRF has undoubtedly given us insight through the 500-plus IT providers who showcased their products, and will be doing the same in 2018 as most of the stands have already sold out.