Summary:
From seeing this comic, Peterson recalls having to schedule shopping trips around times when his children were emotionally ready to be out in busy public spaces in order for them to be well behaved in the grocery store. He then expresses sympathy to parents who don’t have the availability to schedule shopping trips with their children at their children’s convenience. He further explains that he is, however, unsympathetic to parents with fussy children who don’t soothe them or allow full blown temper-tantrums. Peterson relates this back to the comic saying that is when you choose to ”proceed to checkout” rather than “continue shopping.”
From here, he starts delving into the online shopper experience and how it has drifted from the reality of in-store shopping. He suggests that adding screaming kids to online shopping would make it more realistic. He mentions how he’s unsure how a person would recreate the “grocery shopping at midnight” experience online, and how it could be set up for the user to have to click around the website at check out to get the attention of an attendant.
He ends it by saying that he doesn’t shop online to avoid human contact rather he does it to not drive far to a bigger town with a larger selection of bigger stores.
Analysis:
This comic and article have an interesting take on how the shopper’s experience changes when moving from shopping in-store to shopping online. Social aspects, positive and negative, are completely stricken from the experience as a whole. When grocery shopping online, users don’t have a different experience during the day vs. at night whereas the experience is vastly different throughout the day and night when shopping in-store. The online grocery shopping experience has lost its human touch but provides a more swift and efficient service.
The last comment about how he’s not shopping online in order to avoid human contact and socialization stuck out to me considering that this article was written in 2014. Online grocery shopping has evolved so much since 2017, nonetheless since 2014, with Amazon purchasing Whole Foods and investing an influx of technology into it. The biggest push to evolve online grocery shopping happened with the start of the Covid lockdown which was quite literally because people wanted to avoid human contact in order to protect their health.
Source:
Publisher: Weekly Storybook
Author: Mike Peterson
Date: October 16, 2014
Link: https://www.weeklystorybook.com/comic_strip_of_the_daycom/2014/10/nothing-chafes-like-chaff.html
