Zipless grocery shopping and the impact on a brand
[Cross-posted with the iMedia Connection blogs.]
Acute guilt stabbed into me — twice! — during a late-night jaunt to my local Ralphs, and the funny thing is that I wound up blaming Ralphs for my own actions. Is this is a story about a brand hurting itself or one about my own bad behavior?
First stab of guilt: as I prowled the aisles in search of laundry detergent and Peets Coffee, I chatted with my friend Ben on my cell phone. No, I’m not one of THOSE people who shriek into their phones in stores and restaurants, oblivious to the comfort of others while somehow thinking that sheer volume will make up for bad signal. (And it is the opinion of all right-thinking folks that talking on your cell phone while in a movie theater should be a hanging offense.) I spoke in tones so soft that they might be described as murmurs.
Nevertheless, I knew that I was ignoring the flesh and blood humans around me in order to chat with a guy I’ve known since Mrs. Curlender’s third grade class. I lugged my context with me in an iPhone-shaped womb rather than experiencing the time, geography and people in my physical presence. This is like the elective autism granted us by technology that UCLA Neuroscientist Gary Small and Gigi Voran talks about in their new book, iBrain.
Second stab of guilt: when it came time to pay for my Tide and dark roast I saw a long line of people waiting for one forlorn cashier. Still talking sotto voce with Ben I opted for the self-checkout line, sliding my credit card, scanning my items, bagging them, tearing my receipt from the roll. Interactive technology had replaced human interaction.
As I strolled back out to the cool night air and my waiting car I thought, “I’m not coming to Ralph’s anymore. That self-checkout reason that there was only one human on duty… another working class job lost to the neighborhood by a greedy corporation.”
I was painfully aware of the fact that I had voted with my feet to USE the self-checkout, but I blamed Ralphs for giving me the option of a zipless shopping experience. For those of you youngsters out there, “zipless” was a term coined by Erica Jong in her 1973 novel “Fear of Flying.” Jong was talking about “the zipless f***” rather than zipless retail, but the ziplessness is the same: no emotional involvement among the different parties.
My zipless trip to Ralphs was one that afforded no interaction I did not control utterly, no small-talk, no eye contact, no please, no thank you, no sense that the food I eat (or in this case the coffee I drink) is made and prepared by other people to whom I am somehow connected in the great chain of being.
Boiling this down, interactive technologies had boiled all the friction out of the experience, and friction is what creates human experience. One of the findings in Deloitte’s recent State of the Media Democracy study is that most Americans want to spend more time with their families but have trouble making the time because of all the information hemhorraging at them from screens. Since interaction with technology is growing ever-more portable, the simple act of walking away from a screen and looking into the eyes of another person is easier to avoid. I’ve written more about this here.
Retail brands have to balance service over convenience, but in this case Ralph fell out of balance.
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