Do you remember what the future of shopping used to be? In place of a trundle round the high street every few days, we were going to make weekly trips to big-box supermarkets outside town, delight in the bright produce and the enticing smells and drive home happy, our cars low on their axles. Well, there's a new future now: the "dark store", the supermarket that we never see at all.
No one knows how much of our grocery shopping will eventually be done online, but everyone agrees it will be a lot more than now. In 2013, the proportion was about 5.5%. This year it should be around 6%. Within five years the value of the market is expected to double in size. Much of the current online demand is met by simply sending pickers around conventional supermarkets, although as demand rises that becomes less efficient, in part because the physically present customers keep getting in the way. Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Waitrose all have plans to open new dark stores over the coming year or two. "It just makes sense," Creevy says. "Online is just showing huge, huge growth. Online and convenience stores."
