For those of you who don’t enjoy wandering the aisles of the grocery store in search of soy sauce, or mailing back endless pairs of ill-fitting shoes bought online, we have good news for you: Shopping in the future is going to be so much easier than it is today.
Between smartphones and tracking technologies, every trip to the store will be quick, efficient, and a heck of a lot smarter than it is today. Some retailers will even be able to anticipate your needs and take care of them for you.
To get the inside scoop, we talk to Indiana University’s Ray Burke, who studies how customers think and behave. And we hear from Scott Emmons, who heads up innovation for Neiman Marcus, about the high-tech mirrors and tablets they’re bringing to their stores.
And looking further into the future, we talked to the people who are actually making it happen: Devora Rogers and David Mounts at a tech company called Inmar. They are pretty excited about what technology could do for stores and the people who frequent them.
And don’t forget our ever-entertaining Popular Science archives! The futuristic delivery methods we envisioned back in 1939 look a little different from the drones of today. That said, stores aren’t going away. They’re just going to appear in some really interesting new forms.
Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree—code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.
This episode is also sponsored by The Message, a new podcast from GE Podcast Theater. Host Nicki Tomlin follows a team of elite cryptographers as they decode a highly classified radio transmission. To sum it up: extraterrestrials. Check out The Message, on iTunes.

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