Unstaffed retailing gets moving with The Moby Mart

4 min readJun 12, 2017

Wheelys Moby Mart is an autonomous, staffless, mobile store, turning every parking space in the world into a potential new 24-hour store. We are currently working with tech to make the Moby self-driving. It’s the store that comes to you, instead of you coming to the store.

The Moby offers products for immediate consumption, such as milk, lunch, or medicine over the counter, around the clock. Just enter the store, take what you need, and leave. Computers, light bulbs and other stuff can be ordered in advance picked up at your nearest Moby.

By using AI, patented inventions, and the famous cloud, the Moby turns technology invisible. It’s the simplest shopping ever and the offering is identical in Iquigig, Alaska and downtown Manhattan (as if they even had decent 24-hour stores in NYC).

Running on electricity and equipped with solar panels the Moby is also the most environmentally friendly store on the market. With an Integrated Air purifier, the W247 Mobile does not only not pollute; it cleans up.

The Moby Mart is not science fiction. It’s currently Beta Tested in Shanghai and was launched Tuesday the 13th of June.

Who Made Next?

The Moby Mart was built by Wheely´s Inc in collaboration with the Hefei University in China and Himalafy, a company providing technology for unstaffed retail solutions.

“In the coming decades, retail as we know it will disappear. Stores will become powered by apps, they will become accessible 24/7, and they will become mobile.” — Per Cromwell, Wheelys

Wheelys is Y Combinator startup that has raised money from visionaries such as Paul Buchheit (Gmail), Justin Waldron (Zynga), Jared Friedman (Scribd), and others. Over the last 18 months, Wheelys has sold 700 cafés to over 70 countries, growing faster than any café chain ever.

At the end of 2016, Wheelys acquired Näraffär. The world’s first system of staffless stores, operating in Sweden over a year before Amazon GO was announced.

We have now integrated this system into our newly developed, self-driving, mobile supermarkets. It is a full service convenience store on wheels. Instead of you going to the store, the store comes to you. The stores are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. The entire shopping is done using an app: you open the doors, take what you need, and leave. Wheelys has multiple patent pendings for the system.

“The death of retail is slowly killing whole villages. There is a simple solution to turn this around. Create unmanned stores that removes the need for humans to be present in stores at all times” — Robert Ilijason, Wheelys

The stores can be placed anywhere. In the city center, at the driveway in a suburb, or in that small village where the last store closed in 1987.

We are now setting up production in China. Our price estimation is that a store will cost less than $100,000 — around a tenth of the price to build a traditional store.

Combined with the possibility to deliver parcels, self re-stocking, and AI deployment of big fleets, this is a glimpse of the radical new future of retail, and an existential threat to the world’s convenience stores.

Über, Airbnb, and similar companies have revolutionized ancient monopolies. But one bastion still stands: physical retail. It’s a market comprising 21% of the world’s economy.