‘Autonomous stores’ are often characterized in the media as the future of shopping: smart physical environments augmented (Viseu, 2003; Viseu & Suchman, 2010) 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 innovation and progress: for consumers these new and “modern“ spaces are proposed to signify 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 the customers in a store environment, thus perhaps 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, and numerous technological entities (such as, AI, sensors, algorithms, computer vision, cameras). Portugal is one of the leaders in this future-making endeavour:  in 2019, SENSEI, a Portuguese “unicorn” specialized in the development of autonomous stores technologies, partnered with SONAE, one of the largest Portuguese retail chains, to open ‘Continente Labs’ an autonomous store in Lisbon.   This paper draws upon a thematic analysis of data generated from a media analysis of Portuguese and international newspaper articles from 2016 until 2023, combined with an ethnographic approach based on in-depth interviews with key actors from SENSEI and SONAE to examine the sociotechnical imaginaries that are being mobilized in both the media and the developers of such technologies, which help to justify the development of these “cyber-physical-human” systems (Liu, 2018). 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 the concepts of “autonomy” and “smartness” really refering to?

--

sociotechnical imaginaries,retailing,instore technology,autonomy;

• Sociology - Social Sciences
• Media and Communications - Social Sciences