No digital equivalent to the impulse aisle found as online grocery shoppers buy fewer sweet treats than in real life There's no digital equivalent to the love-it-or-hate-it impulse aisle of the supermarket, with shoppers spending noticeably less on sweets, cookies, and other tasty treats online than in the real world. Or so says a study, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, which looked at 137 primary household …
Yes. Those were my first thoughts as well. There was quite a shortage in flour, so unless people were baking healthy cakes (unlikely, the fine white flour was gone first) the total dessert intake did not change. However the factory made stuff contains lots of additives that you will leave out at home, so it's a win overall.
Have been making my own bread for years and was mortified to find so many others suddenly decided to do so too!!! Luckily I always keep a few weeks worth of bread flour in the cupboard and managed to be lucky enough, often enough to get a 2Kg bag or two when they came in before they sold out and at one point early on got a huge sack from a supermarket that kept me and a few neighbours in bread for a month or so :-)
As for the rest of the article, the jist of it seems to be that people spend more in online shopping sessions than at the physical shops, but they spend on different things. Is that even news? I'm not sure why the shops care what people buy, so long as they can sell them more.
On an IT related note, I remember when I first saw a 3D shooter and wondered if it might be possible to do a simulation of the supermarket aisles where people could then buy stuff online by browsing the shelves instead of the clunky search by name and hope it shows what you are looking for in the results or the related items. There could be a version that includes weapon s and looting for release in certain gun-totin' parts of the world :-)
Clearly the people responsible studied web design - so they could implement every possible bad idea.
I have a bar code code reader that pretends to be a keyboard, types in the bar code and presses enter. I tried it on the search box with a tin of beans and the result was newspapers.
Click on check-out then spend ten minutes clicking through "you forgot...", "perhaps you would like...", "on special offer...", "Still five more pages to go before you can check out...". I am sure they paid many thousands for a tardigrade speed analytics system that carefully records that I never click on anything on those pages then recommends the supermarket buys some extra page generators to keep me entertained in the pre-checkout queue.
I admit to trying out the customer feed back survey: "Are the changes a big improvement or a great improvement?" I would like to say I was disappointed but my expectations were that low.
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Have you never had a food delivery?
They have things called refrigerated vans.
Whole sections of the van that use the forced evaporation and condensation of a carefully chosen gas called a refrigerant to transport heat energy out of that section, keeping your ice cream frozen until it's outside your door (which is alot further than it remains frozen if you walk to the supermarket).
Yes I have heard of them. Yes I have had refrigerated deliveries before. But yes I have also had my supposedly refrigerated items arrive in such poor condition that I was forced to refuse the delivery on the grounds that the items were probably unsafe to consume. For example: a carton of milk that was not only warm but hot, a tub of natural butter that smelled bad, and a package of icecream sandwhiches that was leaking melted goop & sloshed.
I am aware that refrigerated delivery services exist, but the farther you are from the store & the longer you have to wait for said delivery, the less feasible it becomes -- why bother with a 1 hour delivery if the store is a ~10 minute drive away & you could have gone in person, bought it, & been back home before the delivery van even considers coming 'round?
*Hands you a pint*
Such services may work well for everyone else, but my experience with refrigerated deliveries has been such that I don't trust them as far as I could push them up a hill with my navigation cane. =-J
Drink up, I hope your experience with them has been better than my own.
@ShadowSystems
"why bother with a 1 hour delivery if the store is a ~10 minute drive away & you could have gone in person, bought it, & been back home before the delivery van even considers coming 'round?"
Big upsurge in deliveries as lots of vulnerable people "shielding" due to COVID, so a delivery a "safer" option than in person visit to the shop. Purely anecdotal, but on street I live, other half (who is retired & at home a lot) has seen far more deliveries than there were pre COVID (supermarket & various couriers)
"Unless you offer free/low cost 1 hour delivery to get the order to the customer before any refrigerated/frozen items go bad, nobody would bother to buy refrigerated/frozen goods online in the first place."
It doesn't get taken off the shelf the moment you order it, then left in the warm until it's delivered. I order groceries online, days ahead of delivery. The delivery firm has a refrigeratorated van, so chilled stuff arrives chilled, frozen stuff arrives frozen. Better than me driving to the shop and having to drive home in my non refrigeratorated car.
Whenever I do my Tesco online order there are "special offers" pushed to my attention. The long list usually starts with the unhealthy snacks and drinks that are often seen as impulse buys.
I start to enter my order at least a week in advance of delivery - so there is time to re-assess whether I actually want something.
Of course there are digital equivalents to the supermarket impulse buys. They are just different items to those typically bought in-shop due to the lack of instant gratification when waiting for delivery is involved.
But while supermarkets can only offer a fixed selection of the same impulse-buy items to all customers, digital stores can tailor the selection offered to suit what's already in the customer's basket. Amazon for example brings up its selection of "Often purchased together with this item" and "Other customers also bought" - both of which I am quite sure result in a healthy number of impulse buys.
This is exactly why the (UK at least) supermarkets were late to online shopping; it wasn't that they couldn't, they were afraid of how much impulse revenue they'd lose. I'm sure I read at the time that there was something akin to an unwritten agreement amongst the big guys about this and then someone blinked first.
Instead of trying to improve my lifestyle by making my life as miserable as theirs seem to be, maybe these so-called "experts" could just Foxtrot Oscar and let me enjoy getting fat and old in my own way? If I want some overpaid self-important mouthpiece like Jamie Oliver telling me what I can and cannot eat then I will ask them. Until then, they can take their nutritional expertise and stick it where the sun don't shine.
That usually shows up when you order aluminum powder.
At least it's a bit more sensible than gmail (back in the day when the deal was "free email if we can run related ads") started showing me ads for kilt rental and bagpipe lessons next to a thread on Functional Programming.
(I assume that went FP -> Haskell -> GHC -> Glasgow -> Scotland -> Profit!)
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