According to grocer-philosopher Ryan, online shopping will work not because it's convenient, but because it's intimate.
After earning a master's degree in philosophy, Ryan Mathews faced two choices: teach or be unemployed. Instead, he became a food trade journalist. Since 1979, he has been applying philosophical thinking to the mundane chore of buying groceries. Now vice president and editor in chief of the industry bible, Progressive Grocer, Mathews sees food as central to all cultures and is dismayed by the prevalence of sterile megasupermarkets that offer overabundance but suck the life out of the shopping experience. He believes technology is reversing that course and that within 10 to 15 years most of us will be ordering groceries online. Wired caught up with Mathews for breakfast in Boston, the only area hosting every major online grocery delivery experiment, making the region what he calls "ground zero for retailing's future."
Wired: Everyone needs to shop for groceries. Does anyone enjoy it?
Mathews: No. People think of shopping for groceries as slightly more pleasant than a root canal. It's always at the bottom of the list of people's everyday activities.
But isn't it a tribal thing that's been happening for centuries, whether we like it or not?
In parts of the world, even in parts of America, it still is a very tribal thing. In New Orleans, it's a tradition for African-American women to get all dressed up on Saturday and take cabs to meet each other socially in the produce department. In more traditional cultures, food is an expression of personal and communal values.
How did it move away from being a social activity into becoming a chore?
In mainstream Anglo culture, we chase calories of convenience. As modern, suburban America evolved, food became much more functional. And the more functional it became, the less of a place it had in people's lives. People quit eating together. As the pace of life accelerated, everyone went off in all kinds of directions. Food has become a casualty of 20th-century complexity.
Can online grocery services reverse this trend?
In a way, yes, because shopping can become interactive again. From an anthropological model, shopping in the physical world is a passive experience. The grocer puts the product on the shelf. I wander through and remove it. It's solitary, monastic. No one anticipates my needs. No one recognizes me as an individual. In the virtual world, I leave footprints. You know who I am. You know how I navigated the purchase path. The ability to re-establish intimacy is self-evident.
Where's the benefit to the consumer?
A virtual grocer should anticipate my needs better than a physical grocer. For a philosophical model, go back to Socrates' confrontation at the temple of Delphi where the Oracle carved "Know thyself." Virtual shopping is about getting total knowledge of a person, in a way that actually lets that person know themselves better.
So, what will virtual shopping of the future look like?
The virtual grocers will have done their data mining. If, say, I have previously purchased significant numbers of Earth-friendly products, they'll send me an email:"Ryan, we've added 10 green products this week you might be interested in."Because they've profiled me, it will expand the range of products they can sell me. The process becomes my intelligent purchasing agent.
And the consumer will enjoy this?
Absolutely. It saves you time, it knows what you want. It also brings you an element of serendipity.
Is anyone doing this today?
Not really. What's being destroyed in the modern retail world is any sense of intimacy. If you look at the supermarket of 1920, the grocer knew who you were, what day you got paid, how many kids you had, whether you were a drunk or a gambler- whatever. He fed your family. And he hired your kid to deliver the products. So you had complete customer knowledge and home delivery. Now, we're coming full cycle.
So, we're using advanced technology to demassify the experience and go back to basics.
Yes. I have a good friend in Michigan who has one store. Inside, he has 26 computers. When I asked him why, he said, "So I can know my customer as well as my grandfather did."
How are people using current online grocery services?
The traditional view was that online shopping would be great for pantry replenishment - paper towels, dog food, laundry detergent, those kinds of items. But at Peapod, the online ordering service that started in Chicago, the Number One item is bananas. The reason? If you look at the profile of average Peapod customers, they are late Xers or young boomers who don't know how to pick fruit. Boomers didn't take their children grocery shopping. So, perishables have done much better online.
Is Peapod the best model? It seems to be losing a fortune by automating the shopping experience: employees go down the supermarket aisles, pick out the food, and deliver it to you at a higher cost.
Peapod is stuck in a certain paradox. The more successful they are, the more money they lose. Being tied to a physical store is self-limiting. The ultimate success of all these services will be as a media, not as a shopping service. The important part is gathering the algorithms about decision-making in the virtual world.
We have less than 1 percent of the population online grocery shopping now. Where are we headed?
It may take five more years to get an effective national model. Then, it will snowball. Demographics favor the virtual shopping experience. Aging boomers will be physically less capable of carrying heavy loads. Also, consider the generation growing up now. I can't conceive of my daughter, who learned to write on a Mac when she was 18 months old, lugging home Tide.
What will happen to the megasupermarkets?
They are a one-stop shopping strategy that will fail over time. But they'll become great places to hold square dances.
