Spatial Retail by the Numbers

Auki Labs
3 min readSep 11, 2023

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Tens of millions of people work in retail.

There’s over 2 billion square meters of retail floor space in the world, or around 350,000 American football fields’ worth, being manned by tens of millions of people.

Walmart alone employs over 2 million people directly and has an annual staff turnover of 44%. The problem of staff turnover is not unique to Walmart, but rather endemic to the entire retail sector.

Every year, Walmart trains almost a million people for their first day on the job, and retailers report that staff training and retention is one of the most significant costs and pain points they face.

Spatial computing has the potential to radically reduce the cost of staff training and the time that staff spend on tasks. Precisely positioned information in space allows for better knowledge transfer and communication than anything previously possible, and at a fraction of the cost of other innovative retail technologies.

The cost of implementing spatial computing in your store may be comparable to the price of a single point-of-sale machine.

Every new retail employee carries a training cost of hundreds of dollars, and spatial computing is about to knock that down to a fraction. Across tens of millions of employees, and 2 billion square meters of retail space, the transformative potential is massive.

We are building retail operations tooling on the posemesh, a decentralized protocol for collaborative spatial computing. If we imagine the ownership of virtual real estate averaging out at the meager price of 0.10 cents per square meter, then the combined posemesh usage from retail operations tooling alone would dwarf the entire Ethereum network’s revenue.

When we factor in future use cases like AR shopper marketing, retailers may be paying much more for spatial computing, as it helps them reduce cost, drive basket size, and increase margins.

At the time of writing, the Ethereum network generates about 3.4 million USD worth of revenue every single day.

The retail sector alone might well be double that before the end of this decade.

Originally published on AukiLabs.com

About Auki Labs

Auki Labs is at the forefront of spatial computing, pioneering the convergence of the digital and physical to give people and their devices a shared understanding of space for seamless collaboration.

With a focus on user-centric design and privacy, Auki Labs empowers industries and individuals to embrace the transformative potential of spatial computing, enhancing productivity, engagement, and human connection.

Auki Labs is building the posemesh, a decentralized spatial computing protocol for AR, the metaverse, and smart cities.

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About The Posemesh Foundation

The posemesh is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based spatial computing network.

The posemesh is designed for a future where spatial computing is both collaborative and privacy-preserving. It limits the surveillance capabilities of any organization and encourages sovereign ownership of private space maps.

The decentralization also offers a competitive advantage, especially in shared AR sessions where low latency is crucial. The posemesh is the next step in the decentralization movement, responding to the growing power of big tech.

The Posemesh Foundation has tasked Auki Labs with developing the software infrastructure of the posemesh.

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Auki Labs

Building the posemesh, a decentralized spatial computing protocol for AR, the metaverse, and smart cities. The proprioceptive sense of machine intelligence.