Survey: People Don’t Really Want Fancy Technology To Help Them Shop

While retailers are falling all over themselves trying to incorporate the latest and greatest retail technology — anything from smart mirrors in fitting rooms to robots that answer questions you’d ask store employees — frankly, shoppers just don’t seem to give a damn.

That’s according to a new survey from GPShopper and market researcher YouGov cited by Bloomberg that seems to indicate we aren’t impressed by shopping tech.

For example, only 18% of more than 1,000 participants polled think smart mirrors will improve their shopping experience, while just 21% of shoppers said virtual assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home makes shopping better.

Basically, shoppers just want to get what they want as quickly and easily as possible. And although stores might be excited about their latest gadgets and gizmos, Maya Mikhailov, a co-founder of GPShopper told Bloomberg, “but consumers aren’t necessarily as eager as they are.”

Chatbots fared particularly poorly, Mikhailov says, mostly because talking to robots is still not as natural as talking with a live human about what you want.

There is one job humans are willing to let robots take care of: 50% of survey respondents said self-checkout is a boon.