Title: The Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store
Context: OK, so it’s a story about grocery stores…or is it?
Synopsis: What do grocery stores have to do with user experience? Well, just about everything as it turns out. Not your mom’s (or dad’s, to be fair) old, TV-dinner-stocking, 2-for-a-dollar supermarket, but rather today’s, reinvented, aisle-less, ‘have a glass of wine while you shop farm-to-table produce’ stores. In the face of a changing retail market and seismic technological shifts in how, when, and where people shop, old-school thinking is the surest path to bankruptcy that any Luddite shopkeeper can take. And what consumers seem to want more than anything, is a fulfilling shopping experience, not so much a coupon-clipped bargain anymore. Feel free to extrapolate the lessons currently being learned in the grocery vertical to any of the other, disruption-ripe industries that you care to name. You either evolve with the times, or that mess you’ll be cleaning up on aisle 3 will be your own business model.
Best Bit: “In order to survive, Kelley says, grocers can’t be satisfied with providing a place to complete a chore. They’ll need to direct an experience.”
Leave a Reply