Imagine yourself standing on a subway or train platform in the morning, waiting to begin your commute to work. It’s an experience shared by millions – yourself perhaps included – on a daily basis. However, instead of casually reading the paper, checking your smartphone, glancing idly at your watch, or scanning for the next train, you are instead doing something far more productive: you’re busy getting your day’s work of grocery shopping done. You’ve got your smartphone busy at work scanning grocery ads alongside the subway wall that will, by the end of your workday, magically translate into food products waiting for you at your stoop when you return home.
This scene could likely soon be a reality across much of the Western world. In South Korea, the grocery chain Home Plus has teamed up with Cheil, an advertising agency, to blanket subway platforms with head-to-foot ads that resemble life-sized versions of grocery shelves. These ads have pictures of drinks, breads, pastas, vegetables, and any other food one could find at the supermarket. A person waiting for the train only needs to hold their phone up to an item and scan that item’s QR code if they desire to purchase a given product. Of course, it is necessary to own a smartphone and download a necessary application before any purchases can be made.
Once an item has been scanned, the smartphone app will immediate charge the user’s bank account and send an order for the product to the nearest Home Plus distributor. Then, within the day, the grocery chain will receive that order, put any scanned products into a personalized bag, and deliver that bag to the user’s house. There is a slight surcharge to the cost of this virtual shopping experience, but the ability to cut out the retail middle-man and forgo some hiring and employee training costs means that South Koreans can save far more in convenience than they spend in money when using the system.
Home Plus has seen a spike in sales since the program began, and other grocery chains across Asia have already begun taking notice and following suit. When can we expect to see such a program expand to Europe and the United States? It’s hard to say for sure, but there’s no doubt that a market exists in major metropolitan centers and that a wide variety of retailers would jump to get onboard. Ultimately, then, it’s only a matter of time before the act of buying food – a highly physical product – only becomes increasingly virtualized.
Article contributed by Jenna Smith