Advice is what physical retail says about itself when asked why it still exists. It is also the thing nobody will accept a price for.

In May 2026 the Institute for Retail, Sales and Marketing at JKU Linz surveyed 1,067 consumers, representative and online. The findings leave little room (opens in new tab): 72 percent expect in-store advice to stay free, 24 percent would be willing to pay for it in principle. If a consultation fee were introduced, 68 percent would sooner buy online and 61 percent would visit stores less often. Christoph Teller, who heads the institute, puts the perceived price of good advice at zero, and says it has been there for decades.

Charge for it, then, and what you lose is not margin. It is footfall. That is a different loss, and the more expensive one.

Two limits belong in this paragraph rather than in a footnote. The study measures physical retail in general, not the organic trade. And it measures explicit fees, the case where advice appears at the till as a line of its own. About embedded funding, about the basket, about third parties, it says nothing. It says one thing only: as a visible price, this service does not work.

In organic retail the same service is not costed, it is defended

BioHandel put the question to three companies (opens in new tab): would voicebots improve customer service? Rapunzel shows the faces of its customer service team on its website; Eva Kiene describes personal advice as a distinguishing feature the company will not give up. Alnatura states that it is expressly not pursuing AI-generated communication for telephone enquiries at present.

These are honest answers. In both cases they are answers about identity, and identity is a good argument. They simply do not answer the other question: who pays for the layer, as long as it carries no price of its own.

The largest player does not answer, it builds

Dennree, the company behind Germany’s largest organic supermarket chain, is examining the introduction of a chatbot and already runs an in-house Copilot instance that helps staff compose personal replies. Its customer line runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

Precision matters more than the punchline here. There is no voicebot. There is no customer-facing chatbot. A chatbot is under examination, and nothing beyond that is on record. The Copilot instance sits inside the house; it does not write with the customer, it writes with the employee.

Which is exactly what makes it interesting. It sits one layer behind the person, where the customer cannot see it and therefore cannot judge it. What the customer sees is still someone answering. What changes is what that answer costs the company.

The automation does not replace the advice, it subsidises it

When a service has value but no price of its own, the only lever left is what it costs to produce. Nothing can be moved on the revenue side; that is what JKU measured. The effort per answered enquiry is another matter.

That is the whole movement. Rapunzel and Alnatura argue at the surface, where the customer is watching and where advice is brand. Dennree does not argue at all and works on the cost side of the same service.

The headline says nobody is using voicebots. The story underneath says the automation has been running for a while, just not where it would have to be announced.

For your own operation, then, the question is not whether a bot picks up the phone. It is what an answered customer enquiry costs today, and who carries that cost, given that the customer demonstrably will not.

Apparatus: The willingness-to-pay figures come from a representative online survey by the Institute for Retail, Sales and Marketing (IHaM) at Johannes Kepler University Linz, 1,067 consumers, May 2026, reported by Tobias Seifried on leadersnet.at (opens in new tab), 23 July 2026; the quotation from institute head Christoph Teller is from the same piece. The company statements on Rapunzel (Eva Kiene), Alnatura and Dennree (Inka R. Stonjek, press office) come from Jutta Koch’s article on biohandel.de (opens in new tab), 14 July 2026. No company surveyed there operates a voicebot; Dennree is examining a chatbot, and the Copilot instance runs internally in support of staff. The IT expert also quoted in that article, Thomas Kress, is managing director of Deutsche CyberKom for IT security and telecommunications and therefore speaks from the vendor side; his recommendation is deliberately not used here. Source intake: Radar 2026-W30, signals 01 and 02.