Desert Island Retail Technology: Melissa Moore talks mobile payments, barcodes, Just Walk Out and AI — Retail Technology Innovation Hub
Publish Date: 2026-05-21 00:31:00
Source Domain: retailtechinnovationhub.com
RTIH: The most exciting and promising retail technology right now?
MM: The genuinely exciting one isn’t the shiny, customer facing stuff. It’s AI in the back office. I know what it’s like to be running a store and doing a hundred jobs at once, all while looking after the customer in front of you.
So, it’s demand forecasting, allocation, markdown optimisation and the quiet magic of electronic shelf labels that excite me. Nobody’s going to make a Netflix documentary about replenishment or pricing but getting the right product to the right place at the right time is the problem retail has been chasing since I was on that landline in 1998. When it works, staff are freed up to actually serve customers, wastage numbers come down and the customer just finds what they came for.
RTIH: The retail technology solution you’d take to a desert island.
MM: The humble barcode. It’s over 50 years old. Nobody ever calls it innovative and there isn’t a keynote stage in the world that would book it. Yet not one single thing in modern retail works without it.
Every scan, every stock count, every online order, every self-checkout: all of it rests on that little row of black and white lines. It’s the teabag of retail technology: unglamorous, utterly essential, quietly holding the whole thing together while the flashier inventions get all the attention.
If I could only keep one piece of kit, it would be the one that everything else depends on. Practically speaking, on a desert island I could at least use it to keep track of my coconuts, because inventory management is inventory management, whatever the location!
RTIH: The most overhyped retail technology solution.
MM: Just Walk Out checkout. The technology that was going to kill the till for good. You’d stroll in, lift what you wanted off the shelf and simply walk out again. It’s not shoplifting when you have the cameras and sensors doing their thing, but it doesn’t feel right.
It was dazzling on a conference stage. The trouble was…
