The robots went to Seoul looking for work

27 October 2026

A Chinese humanoid went to Seoul this autumn and found work before Korea had a rival of its own to send. That gap is the story.

The Korea Times, in partnership with the South China Morning Post, reports that Chinese makers have moved on from dance routines and showroom poses to factory trials and paying customers. A robot-themed venue in Seoul bought UBTech’s lifelike U1, delivered last month for around 170,000 yuan, roughly 18,000 pounds, according to the company’s Sean Qin. UBTech has also announced a trial on a Korean automotive parts line with local partners. Anyverse Dynamics, a Beijing startup whose founder Zhang Yufeng once worked with SK Telecom and Hyundai, plans café trials in the fourth quarter before moving into manufacturing. On the Chinese customs data cited in the piece, Korea was China’s third-largest export market for intelligent bionic robots in the first nine months of 2026, taking just under 20 million dollars of a 207 million dollar total.

Counterpoint’s Ethan Qi gives the reason plainly: nobody builds humanoids locally at scale, and that has left an opening for Chinese suppliers. Korea makes the world’s robotic arms, ships and chips, but not yet the humanoid. So the most automated manufacturing nation on earth is importing the machine that will automate the next layer of its work, from the one country that learned to build it cheaply and ship it fast.

Why it matters. Seoul has seen this coming. The government has proposed 3.1 trillion won, about 1.75 billion pounds, in physical AI funding for 2027, more than triple this year’s, with a target of 500 AI factories by 2030. Samsung set up a robotics division in July. LG is building a data factory to train robots. Hyundai is putting Boston Dynamics’ Atlas through drills at its Georgia campus ahead of a 2028 line deployment. Korea has the intent and the money. It lacks what the robot runs on today: a supply chain, engineering depth and rapid iteration of the kind that only exists at scale in Shenzhen. Korea can fund the ambition in a single budget, but it cannot buy back the five years of deployment data China gathered while the West debated whether a humanoid needs five fingers or two.

Deployment data decides who wins, because a robot that has served a thousand coffees knows things a prototype never will. Every trial Anyverse runs in a Seoul café and every UBTech unit tested on an AJIN parts line feeds a loop that compounds. Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon made the same point at a Seoul roundtable: China is deploying more humanoids in the field and collecting the data. He then asked whether Korea’s plans were bold enough. The politics suggest they are not. At a parliamentary audit on 6 October, one lawmaker wheeled in Unitree and AgiBot machines to shame the government, and another accused the Assembly of handing Chinese technology a stage. Both reactions sound like a country discovering it has become a customer when it meant to be a champion.

For retailers and brand owners the lesson reaches well beyond Korea. If you do not make the layer that matters, you do not set the terms on it. You pay the price the maker names, adapt to their certification and wait your turn. Korea is learning this as national industrial strategy. A retailer learns it the day its store robots, fulfilment, shelf scanning and service all arrive on hardware built by a company that also sells to its competitors.

What to watch. Watch whether Korea’s big manufacturers put a humanoid into their own lines before Chinese suppliers take the proof-of-concept slots. Whoever goes first collects the data, the certification path and the reference customer, and those are much harder to win back than a robot.

The Roth Read. No retailer is going to build its own robots. The hardware will come from someone else, most likely from Shenzhen, so the layer a retailer can own is what those machines learn in its stores: which jobs they do well, and where shoppers still want a person. The first retailer to put them to work starts learning first, and competitors have to make up every month of that lead. You can buy the hardware at any time, but you can never buy back the time. Decide this quarter how you will deploy, and write into every contract that the data from each robot in your estate belongs to you. Then put a team and a plan behind it, because owning the data is worth nothing until someone is learning from it.

History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 10: Greek Agora

26 October 2026
Greek Agora · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

600 BC

By about 600 BC all cities in Ancient Greece would have had an agora near their center.

A market place as well as a meeting place, the agora was usually a rectangular space surrounded by buildings and frequented by politicians, traders, aristocrats, scientists and slaves. Along one edge was the 'stoa', a long covered walkway with shops located in it, where more expensive items could be purchased than those found on the traders' stalls.

Farmers brought their produce to the agora and set up stalls selling meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, eggs, honey, and wine. Cattle and grain were also traded, as were more exotic items such as gems, silks, wool, and, of course, slaves. A hive of activity, craftsmen would ply their trade and moneychangers and bankers would carry out their business. 'Shopping' at the agora was conducted by men and their household slaves, not by women.

The agora was also a focus for cultural and community activity. Political debate, theater, and musical performances would draw citizens in as they fraternized with friends and business associates. It also served as a labor exchange as employers mixed with men looking for work. Although it was a predominantly male environment, women were allowed to use the agora's public fountains to collect water.

Contribution to Retail History

Defined as the open place of assembly, the agora was the precursor to the town center and exemplified the social behavior and importance of how societies have always come together for entertainment and commercial activity.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

About the series. The History of Retail in 101 Objects is compiled and edited by David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of WPP BAV. It tells the story of retail through the objects that shaped it, from the cave to the connected store, organised across the historical periods in which each innovation made its mark. As David puts it, the history of retail is the history of mankind, and of retail’s vast contribution to society. A new object appears here every Monday.

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →

In Conversation: Neela Montgomery, Alix Partners, Logitech, Ahold Delhaize

23 October 2026

The K-shaped consumer, and why growth now lives at the store level

Neela Montgomery, Senior Advisor / Board Director, Alix Partners, Logitech, Ahold Delhaize · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

The top 10 percent of American shoppers are now driving half the sales. That is the number Neela Montgomery keeps in front of her boards, and it reframes what growth even means. If you serve the strained consumer, she says, you are “having to trade every transaction.” If you serve the premium end, you are fine. The middle is where the pain lives.

Montgomery sits as a board director and senior advisor across Alix Partners, Logitech and Ahold Delhaize, with a past life running Crate and Barrel and CVS and cutting her teeth at Tesco. She has seen the machinery from the inside.

Her read on where the levers actually sit is the useful part. Not autonomy for store managers, but intelligence pushed out to them: central data ingested by AI, then handed to the furniture seller at Crate and Barrel as a personalised solution so they can do what they are good at, which is selling. On AI itself she is blunt · the experimentation phase is over. One 16-year company veteran, pointed at the customer software with unlimited access to a coding tool, found 280 points of failure and the machine fixed 60 on its own. That is the power: speed to clear historical tech debt.

Then there is GLP-1. Ten to twelve percent of Americans now on the drugs, smaller clothing sizes, less volume through grocery, and a scramble towards protein and fibre. A killer for some categories, a premiumisation story for others.

What matters for you is that every one of these shocks has a shape you can trade against, if you can see your customer at a granular enough level. Most retailers still cannot.

The Roth Read. If half your sales come from a tenth of your shoppers, you do not have a marketing budget problem, you have a targeting problem. Stop spending to acquire people without the spending power, and start pushing your best intelligence to the person on the shop floor. The winners this cycle will be the ones who trade every transaction on purpose.

David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.

A 40-square-metre fish cake stall tells you how to enter China now

22 October 2026

A Korean fish cake brand has just opened a shop the size of a studio flat in the basement of a Shanghai department store, and the way it got there is worth a look. Samjin Foods has entered China in a sequence most Western brands still get backwards.

Samjin Foods, the Busan-based company behind the Samjin Fish Cake brand, opened its first eastern China store on 16 October on the second basement level of the New World Dawan department store on Nanjing East Road, in Shanghai’s Huangpu district. The Korea Times reports the outlet runs as a hot deli, cooking to order, a format the company does not use in its own Korean stores. On some days during the soft opening, the company says, sales reached as much as 200 percent of target. According to the Seoul Economic Daily, the crowd shifted over the National Day holiday from mostly tourists to nearby residents and office workers.

While the shop builds the brand, the distribution is already running underneath it. Samjin’s Sun-sal Bar fish cake bars are sold through about 1,300 Lawson convenience stores in Shanghai and surrounding areas, the company says. Bulk packs went into two Shanghai Costco stores at the end of September, and the product is on display in Hema, Alibaba’s Freshippo. The company also told the Korea Times it is in talks with Pang Dong Lai, the Henan retailer Chinese shoppers admire almost cultishly, about getting on its shelves.

Most Western brands plant a glossy flagship, pour money into the opening, and then spend two years wondering why the single store cannot carry the brand alone. Samjin turned that around and treats the shop as a laboratory. It cooks product in front of a Chinese shopper and watches which flavours move: the cheese croquette and the rosé-sauce rice cakes, two dishes invented for a palate that is not Korean. It then feeds that reading straight into what the convenience stores and warehouse clubs should stock. One rented basement unit gives Samjin a test kitchen and a demand signal for 1,300 fridges at once.

China rewards the brand that is small enough to iterate and connected enough to scale the moment the data says go. Samjin is doing both in the same quarter, refining the recipe in Huangpu while the bars already sit in Lawson, Costco and Hema.

The partners are also telling. Samjin did not assemble a bespoke China joint venture over eighteen months of legal fees. It used the ready-made rails of the market: a convenience chain, a warehouse club, a fresh-grocery platform, and a bid for the shelf of the one retailer every Chinese shopper trusts.

What to watch is the Pang Dong Lai conversation. A listing there would work as a credibility stamp more than a distribution win, because Chinese shoppers treat its shelves as a curated verdict on quality, and the store does not simply sell slots. If a mid-sized Korean fish cake brand lands on those shelves on the strength of a few months of Shanghai sales data, the curated gatekeeper is now a faster route in than the glossy flagship ever was.

The Roth Read. If you are planning a China entry, stop asking how big the opening should be and ask how fast it can teach you. Build the smallest shop that can cook, watch and report, wire it to distribution rails that already exist, and let the shelf do the scaling. The brands that win here learn fastest, and they act on what they learn before the quarter is out.

The comforting story about automation is the one that lets us stop thinking.

21 October 2026

The most seductive idea in robotics this week is a sentence rather than a machine: the robots are leaving, and automation will hand us back our humanity. It is written warmly, argued confidently, and beside the point.

It comes from a Forbes author post by a technology founder at the natural-language firm Arria, who says he does not buy the AI doomsday hype. His case is the old reassurance in new clothing. History shows automation changes the nature of work rather than the rate of unemployment, earlier waves freed our bodies from physical labour, and now language technology will free our minds from the robotic mental grind.

The argument is appealing, and it asks you to take a lot on trust.

Other voices this fortnight are far less soothing, and they are better sourced. Research published by Anthropic on 30 September, reported by India Today, found that large language models and robots could potentially perform tasks accounting for around 81 percent of working time in the US economy. The same research adds the caveat the reassurance crowd skips: current robots remain expensive and limited in the physical world, with nursing and general repair less exposed than driving and warehouse work. Being able to do a task does not mean replacing the worker. Even so, 81 percent of working time is not a rounding error you can wave away with a word like humanity.

This matters to anyone who runs a business rather than writes about one. The claim that automation only changes the nature of work is true in the long aggregate and brutal in the particular. The truck driver displaced in year one gets no comfort from a prompt engineer being hired in year five. The economist James Pethokoukis, in his AEI essay on robot trucks, points out that the panic over self-driving vehicles displacing drivers is now more than a decade old, and the fleet of unmanned lorries has not arrived on schedule. So the timing is slow, the dislocation is real, and the people reassuring you tend to be the ones selling the software.

The founder arguing that automation returns us to our humanity sells automation. The vision of work made optional, of abundance for all, is offered most loudly by the people who own the machines, and none of them discloses the gap between the promise and the interest. Nobody in these pieces explains who captures the value that 80 percent of working time represents, or how it reaches the person whose job it displaced. That question about distribution is the whole argument, and the brochure leaves it out.

Zoho’s founder Sridhar Vembu, quoted in the same India Today piece, at least names it. He calls universal basic income an “unimaginative and dystopian vision,” and argues instead for livelihoods in nature, nurture, culture and scripture: restoring soil, raising children, caring for the old, making music. You need not agree to respect the move. He is asking what humans are for when production gets cheap, while the leaving story assumes the answer sorts itself out.

What to watch. For retail and brands, the practical read is to plan around neither the comforting timeline nor the frightening one. Plan around the Anthropic distinction: tasks fall faster than occupations. The jobs your customers trust a human to do, the ones with touch, judgement and care, are the last to go and the first to command a premium. The brand that automates the drudgery and visibly keeps the humanity will win the shopper. The brand that automates the humanity and keeps the drudgery will lose her.

The Roth Read. When someone tells you the robots are leaving and your humanity is coming back, ask who gets the money the robots made on the way out. If the person reassuring you also sells the software, you are reading a sales deck. Check who funds the next wave of “automation sets us free” essays, and read the disclosure line before the headline. Automate the drudgery, guard the human touch your customers pay for, and never let a pretty sentence do your planning for you.

History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 9: Coin

19 October 2026
Coin · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

700 BC

In China, from around 1200 BC, the cowrie shell was used as an item of exchange – ‘shell money’. Archaeologists’ finds suggest that from 1000 BC the Chinese began to produce mock cowrie shells made of metal.

However, evidence indicates that metal coins also appeared independently of each other and these Chinese versions, at two other locations on the Eurasian continent – Lydia (now Turkey) and India between 700-600 BC. It is thought that increased trade between these locations was a trigger for the creation of coins to replace the barter system.

Bartering had two distinct disadvantages – the person wishing to ‘buy’ may not have anything the ‘seller’ wished to acquire, and even if they could agree on a trade, the haggling process was time consuming. Coins offered a solution in that they represented fixed values and could be exchanged not for their intrinsic value, but in order to change hands again in payment for some other goods.

An appreciation of the value of metals such as gold and silver had already developed. Since these metals were durable, portable and demand for them remained constant, they were a natural choice for use as a common currency. The value of a coin depended upon its weight and metal content.

The idea of using coins quickly spread to Greece, and because the early Greeks were keen traders throughout the Mediterranean, coinage spread around the region. Alexander the Great minted vast quantities of silver coins, using them to pay his armies and keep them loyal. It is believed that this significantly contributed to his ability to expand across three continents.

Contribution to Retail History

Whether Greek, Roman or Islamic, gold or silver, hammered or milled, coins represented an inherent value that fostered trade among local tribes as well as nations. Throughout ancient and modern civilizations, coins not only represented a certain trusted value, but also a message of culture and symbolism as various images, rulers and leaders were engraved on them.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

About the series. The History of Retail in 101 Objects is compiled and edited by David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of WPP BAV. It tells the story of retail through the objects that shaped it, from the cave to the connected store, organised across the historical periods in which each innovation made its mark. As David puts it, the history of retail is the history of mankind, and of retail’s vast contribution to society. A new object appears here every Monday.

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →

In Conversation: Jon Stine, Honeycomb Retail AI

16 October 2026

The Tsunami Is Coming, and You Cannot Tell the Water to Go Away

Jon Stine, Fellow, Honeycomb Retail AI · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Not a wave. Not a tidal wave. A tsunami that changes everything, and the first waters are already reaching the shore.

Jon Stine has spent a career at the meeting point of retail and technology, working with and for Intel and many of the world’s top technology companies, and he now sits as a Fellow at Honeycomb Retail AI. He came to Berlin to watch the water come in.

Two things he said are worth carrying home. The first is about where the value actually lands. The glamour is on the front end, the content, the agentic search, the brand showing up inside a large language model. But the money, Stine argues, is round the back: “the vast majority of the value will come from the use of agents to transform, recreate, re-architect business processes.” His method is unfashionably disciplined. Do not throw AI at a pain point and hope. Start with an operational metric. Replenishment that took two days from recognition to order, can you take it to sixteen hours, or eight, or four? Find the marginal basis points, then let them compound.

The second is speed, and here he is blunt. The differentiator will be the ability to know sooner, decide smarter and act faster than your competition. Not because speed is a virtue in itself, but because the shopper already knows sooner. The AI natives are in primary consumption spaces now, and their expectations only rise.

For a brand owner, the warning is precise. Your brand strength is what a large language model reaches for, but your operations are what let you keep the promise it makes.

The Roth Read. Stop asking what AI can do and start asking which decision you make too slowly. Name the metric, cut the hours, let the basis points compound. The shopper already knows sooner than you do.

David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.

BYD drew a robot. The drawing you should study is the dealership floor.

15 October 2026

BYD filed a design patent this week, and the drawing matters less than where BYD says the robot will go.

On 9 October, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration published an “Embodied AI Robot” design patent with BYD as the holder, according to CarNewsChina and Star News Korea. The drawings show a black-and-white humanoid with a rounded, screenless head and jointed torso, arms and legs, designed to walk, balance and interact with people. It looks very like “Xiao Di”, a robot a BYD executive teased on social media earlier this year. Figures disclosed earlier put Xiao Di at 1.61 metres and 58.5 kilos, with 31 degrees of freedom and a hand accurate to plus or minus one millimetre. BYD has not confirmed that the patent shows the production model.

Most carmakers now have a humanoid in a slide deck. BYD has also said where its one will work. According to CarNewsChina, its executives plan to deploy these robots across the company’s own dealership network, to greet customers, explain the cars and demonstrate the in-car infotainment. They are meant for the showroom, not the factory.

That makes this a retail story. For twenty years the dealership has been the weak link for premium car brands. Service varies from one site to the next, and a carefully built brand can be undersold by whoever happens to be on the floor that Saturday. BYD wants to automate the one role no carmaker has ever controlled: a salesperson who never has an off day, never improvises the pitch, never forgets the script, and demonstrates the infotainment the same way in Shenzhen as in Stuttgart. The robot is the headline. The bigger change is brand control reaching the last metre of the sale, the one part the brand has never owned.

China matters here because of how BYD builds. It is the world’s largest integrated maker of electric vehicles, and it is making this robot the way it makes everything else: in-house, at scale and from its own parts. It set up a dedicated robotics team in 2022, invested in AgiBot in 2023 and took a stake in Percibot in 2025. It has also been running Ubtech’s Walker S1 inside its own Changsha plant to collect operating data. BYD already makes the batteries, motors and actuators and runs the factory floor, so the robot is simply the next product down the same line. A Western carmaker partners with a robotics firm and negotiates over the margin. BYD owns both sides of that deal, and Western boards keep underestimating what that is worth.

There is reason for caution. A design patent is a drawing. There is no price, no reliability data and no deployment date, and Xiao Di may never get beyond the teaser video. A hand accurate to a millimetre still has to survive a showroom full of children and spilled coffee. So far BYD has shown renders and no revenue, and scepticism is fair.

The intent is still clear. BYD wants to know whether a humanoid can be the brand’s own face in the room where the sale happens. That is a far more commercial question than whether one can work in a warehouse, and almost no Western retailer or carmaker is seriously asking it yet.

What to watch. See whether BYD puts one of these robots on a dealership floor before it puts one in a factory. The order of deployment will show what BYD thinks the robot is for. If customers meet it first, BYD is selling brand control rather than cost savings, and that is the version retail executives should worry about.

The Roth Read. Picture the robot on your own shop floor, in your uniform, saying your words every time, without fail. BYD has said its humanoid belongs where the customer decides, in the showroom. If your brand still treats the last metre of the sale as somebody else’s problem, BYD is about to show you what that assumption costs.

Agatha Christie, by Lucy Clayton

15 October 2026
Agatha Christie, drawn for Brand Stories from Brand Champions

Lucy Clayton on Agatha Christie. One of 121 stories from Brand Stories from Brand Champions, which I devised and curated for The Store, WPP.

I love Agatha Christie.

Not because she is the bestselling novelist of all time (only Shakespeare & The Bible beat her for readership and I confess I am rather less familiar with those works) but because her stories are told and retold today with as much enthusiasm as when she first wrote them. The constant adaptations give a freshness to the tales but it is their familiarity that gives them longevity; the comfort of repetition. I've loved them since childhood, spending many hours replaying audiobooks on tape until the sound started to hiss with stretching. And nothing soothes a hangover like an early 90s ITV Poirot you've seen a hundred times before. I'm not sure I've ever seen the end of a Poirot, I tend to fall asleep somewhere in the middle so to be honest I never really know whodunnit. I love that her work is constantly being repackaged , from beautiful reissued books to lavish Hollywood movies. The same stories dusted off and given a new lease of life. As period pieces, they allow us to enjoy the eternal appeal of art deco; everything is so refined and gilded and precise, even while there's claret splattered all over the walls. I've always thought Miss Marple is a fashion icon. No one does knitwear like her. Geraldine McEwan's wardrobe is my favorite, she had the most flair – lots of lace collars and layering.

We think of authors as brands quite naturally these days, we know modern writers must do the rounds of the literary festivals and public speaking, we expect perfect Instagramming to accompany each new publication. But Agatha Christie was better than that, bashing out novels while starring in her own (unsolved) mystery in her personal life. Her shocking eleven-day disappearance made the front page of the New York Times and Conan Doyle took one of her gloves to a medium to try and solve the thing. We don't know if it was a stunt but if it was it was genius.

It was after visiting Mrs Christie in 1934, at Exeter St David's station bookstall, that Allen Lane came up with the idea for good books at a price everyone could afford, going on to democratize literary fiction and start a paperback revolution with Penguin Books. Perhaps her legacy is far greater than simply the gentle art of murder.

Lucy Clayton
Lucy is CEO of Community Clothing, a social enterprise with a mission to sustain and create jobs in the UK textile and garment manufacturing industry, where many of the workforce are at risk from the closure of factories. Together with Founder, British Fashion Designer Patrick Grant, Lucy has focused on delivering the company’s social impact, collaborating with organisations working with the long-term unemployed. So far the brand has created over 11,000 hours of skilled working hours in UK factories. Lucy’s career began at a fashion startup in New York and has taken her on a diverse journey from the pages of The Lady Magazine to the Playboy Mansion. Before Community Clothing, Lucy was a Board Director at J. Walter Thompson, running the Graduate Recruitment and Training programme and working with Rimmel London, Warehouse, Glamour Magazine Coty Fragrances, HSBC, Pfizer & Unilever. Passionate about discovering and mentoring talent, Lucy regularly gives talks in schools and colleges. She is part of the charity “Speakers 4 Schools” a committed network of leading figures who want to give back to young people in state schools. She regularly speaks on industry trends at events including WGSN, AdWeek Europe, The Crowd, Fashion Revolution Open Studio Week etc. She is number 22 in the Financial Times and HERoes inaugural list of top 50 Women Role Models in Business, 2017.

There are 120 more. Brand Stories from Brand Champions collects 121 people writing about the one brand that shaped them. Amazon UK · Amazon US. The full index is at www.davidroth.com/brand-stories/stories/.

History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 8: Paper Money

12 October 2026
Paper Money · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

1000 BC

Paper currency, which was first developed by the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century, marked the beginning of simplifying the payment process and making it easier, less cumbersome, and far more dependable. Produced primarily from cotton, paper money also contributed to the expansion of trade among regions and territories. With 180 recognized currencies worldwide today, paper money has recently given way to electronic transactions and the future will be greatly influenced by various digital crypto currencies.

In the 13th century, when Genghis Khan conquered China, he quickly grasped the potential of its paper money and began using it as a currency throughout his empire. He seized people's existing supplies of gold and silver and gave them paper currency in exchange, leaving the population no option but to trade with paper money.

Although the use of paper money spread and continued for several hundred years, it was not wholeheartedly embraced. In Persia, its introduction in 1294 led to a complete collapse of trade. In the 15th century in China, the issuing of paper notes was mismanaged, leading to rapid depreciation of their value and causing inflation. As a consequence, the use of paper money in China ceased in 1455 and did not resume for many years.

Europe came far behind Asia and the Arab world in its adoption of paper money, primarily because Europe didn't have paper until around 1100 AD. The alleged first instance of the use of paper money in Europe was in Spain in 1438 during a Moorish invasion (a Spanish military leader paid his soldiers with paper).

Early on in the introduction of paper money, European governments took over its production and began printing 'official' paper money. These paper receipts were all given fixed values and people began leaving their heavy coins with merchants in exchange for them. The earliest known English goldsmith certificates were being used by 1633 as proof of ability to pay.

Nations and colonies developed their own paper money, leading to the variety of notes in use today. In 1816, governments established the 'gold standard', to ward against inflation. This tied the value of paper money to a specific amount of gold, held in the government treasuries. The US officially adopted the gold standard in 1900.

Today, not all notes are widely accepted and the average lifespan for a currency's circulation is only 39 years. The longest running paper currencies are the British pound, (introduced in 1694) and the US dollar (introduced in 1792).

Contribution to Retail History

The earliest paper money was used in China around 1000 BC and it was most commonly used as a letter of credit, transferred over large distances.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

About the series. The History of Retail in 101 Objects is compiled and edited by David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of WPP BAV. It tells the story of retail through the objects that shaped it, from the cave to the connected store, organised across the historical periods in which each innovation made its mark. As David puts it, the history of retail is the history of mankind, and of retail’s vast contribution to society. A new object appears here every Monday.

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →