Mindfulness in Shopping Malls

How will we go about our shopping activities in the future? What will our much-cherished shopping experience be like in the year 2028? According to various prognoses, retail trade is entering into a crisis. People will walk into a particular shop, take a look at the product, be given advice and then buy it elsewhere over the internet. Or they will go to the shop merely to pick up something they ordered online.     

However, it is the major companies that can profit from today‘s technological advancements. Westfield, the Australian-American-British chain of department stores, has announced plans to this effect. These involve: aisles overflowing with artificial intelligence, a farm where any customer can go and harvest vegetables, and smart lavatories giving health tips such as, „You could do with a little more vitamin C, Sir. And how about purchasing a drink from our store before you dehydrate?“ Yes, that sort of language might soon be heard emanating from a toilet.       

The shopping malls of the future will be „hyperconnected micro cities“. Hanging sensory gardens, eye scanners telling the customers what they previously bought, and smart changing booths in which customers may assess their virtually simulated frame in the considered article of clothing.

These offers do not surprise me in the least and will probably fail to increase my low propensity for shopping. What does amaze me, however, is that in the shopping mall of the future there are to be mindfulness courses for people to take.     

I quite like the idea, yet the project could easily blow up in corporate faces: if people were to become more mindful and deepen their awareness, inner richness would end up more important to them than the shopping activities they carry out on the outside and material goods they buy. The impulse to go shopping, as caused by mechanisms of addiction spurred by the advertising industry, would be considerably weakened. Consumers would become more modest and contented, their needs would become more simple and they would turn from short-lived fashion trends to something longer-lasting. It would indeed be an important contribution to curtailing the dynamised waste of resources.

Ergo: Let us go for more mindfulness in shopping malls!