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Despite the dominance of e-commerce, physical high streets and retail environments have not disappeared. Instead, they have entered a prolonged period of conceptual misalignment: spaces optimised for inventory turnover in an economy increasingly organised around automation, logistics, and algorithmic coordination. This working paper reframes the high street as engagement infrastructure rather than a point-of-sale system. It argues that physical space retains unique economic and civic value precisely where digital systems excel least: embodiment, social presence, shared attention, and visible coordination. The paper introduces “linger”—time spent in shared physical environments—as a productive economic variable in post-labour societies. As an illustrative implementation, the paper presents the Freetail engagement arena as one archetype of engagement infrastructure. In this model, material goods function as boundary objects that render economic coordination legible without becoming the primary purpose of participation. The paper explicitly accepts the dominance of frictionless online purchasing and positions physical retail as a complementary interface rather than a competitor. A central contribution is the resolution of the Privacy–Engagement Paradox: how to recognise meaningful human participation without behavioural surveillance. The paper outlines a privacy-by-design approach based on cryptographic presence verification, ordinal participation bands, and local aggregation, ensuring that engagement signals remain coarse-grained and non-optimisable while retaining democratic legitimacy. This work should be read as a downstream implementation case study within a broader constitutional framework for engagement-based economic coordination. It contributes to ongoing debates in post-labour economics, algorithmic governance, urban commons, and AI-mediated societal transition by offering a testable, spatially grounded model of visible economic participation. Version 2.0 incorporates expanded privacy safeguards, engagement metrics, and alignment with engagement-credit economic frameworks. This paper is a downstream implementation case study within the Engagement Credit Economy (ECE) framework, which provides the parent constitutional and macroeconomic architecture for engagement-based coordination in post-labour, AI-mediated societies: https://zenodo.org/records/17901757 Author Statement This work is authored by an independent researcher operating outside formal institutional affiliation. The research was conducted without external funding and without direction from commercial or governmental entities. The author’s independence is intentional and reflects the subject matter of the work itself: the design of post-labour economic and governance frameworks that are not constrained by incumbent institutional incentives. All conceptual framing, system architecture, and conclusions are the author’s own. Advanced AI tools were used selectively for drafting assistance, structural refinement, and exploratory modelling under full human supervision. Responsibility for all claims rests solely with the author.