Techfold did an interesting post on the evolution of grocery shopping - it’s good “out there” thinking that touches on how one dimension of social and local shopping might evolve. A brief excerpt below sets the stage, then Rod goes on to extrapolate to a web 2.0 social scenario (which I consider extreme, but it is thought-provoking):

Online, we have a clickstream that charts our actions and attention. In a grocery store we have a purchase-stream - the exhaustive record of everything we’ve ever purchased, tracked by any major chain.

It is notable how the point-of-sale industry has not driven any value back to consumers despite decades of saving and storing sku level transactional data. It’s certainly a fair bet that web 2.0 thinkers will work to invert this model, and drive value from the purchasing back office to the consumer experience.

The scenario that makes real sense to me centers on the notion of giving the consumer the tools that drive meaningful productivity and convenience value through a combination of 1) saved product lists, 2) recipe and related special list widgets and 3) aisle-organizing output tools (pushed to my phone please).

Being a guy, I natively dislike the notion of shopping in drug stores - so, I’ve come to rely on drugstore.com’s trademarked “your list” which simplifies re-order, drives email reminders and links me to relevant specials and user reviews.

For groceries, adding the convenience of converting recipes into lists is already done well by several recipe sites, and 2.0 nutritional analysis sites like DailyPlate can flag the things on my list that I may want to reconsider! I’d also appreciate an in-car widget that quietly queues the list into a dashboard alert when I’m near my saved shopping venues.

All reachable stuff in the grasp of current technologies.

The more outlandish scenarios can be fun - Rob painted one in is his social scenario (would I really want to hook up over a common obsession with creamed corn?); I mused along over the anticipation of “Google Aisle View” for live navigation.

There is an interesting nugget in this exchange that is worth attention - will local shopping 2.0 be more driven by productivity scenarios like I posture, or is there a more social element to this than meets the eye of us mainstream types? Don’t answer that one too quickly, I think it’s a really important fundamental question.

Posted by Perry on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 4:01 pm.