China market research group

It's lunchtime in Shanghai and there are plenty of cooks in one restaurant's kitchen. But when the food is ready, you won't see any waitstaff; instead, dishes are delivered by robot pods on a high-tech track that quickly guides them to their destination. "This is so classy and fun, and the food is delicious, too," one customer told correspondent Ben Tracy. The robot restaurant is inside a rapidly-growing Chinese grocery store chain called Hema (that's "hippo" in Mandarin), where almost everything is done digitally. It's owned by Alibaba, one of the largest e-commerce companies on the planet. It also owns Alipay, the most-used digital payment service in China. Its chairman, Jack Ma, is now trying to reinvent brick-and-mortar retail by fully merging it with e-commerce, designing physical stores around our smartphones. He calls it "new retail." That's because China says 98 percent of its internet traffic comes from cellphones, compared to just over 40 percent in the U.S. The entire … [Read more...] about From robot restaurants to automobile vending machines: The e-commerce revolution in China