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Grocery Stores, the Purchase-Stream, and Web 2.0

Online, we have a clickstream that charts our actions and attention. In a grocery store we have a purchase-stream - the exhaustive record of everything we’ve ever purchased, tracked by any major chain. Personally, I prefer shopping at Safeway - and I don’t doubt for a second that my “Safeway Club Card” is a GUID for me in Safeway’s customer purchases database, linking me to my buying history - and great savings (grin).

Unfortunately, “great savings” are where the party stops. Safeway does little to surface the value in that data to consumers (who knows what they’re doing with it for their own purposes). This is where the lessons and business models of Web 2.0 come into play. Consider these three ideas, all predicated on the existence of a Safeway.com website that I could log into with my club card:

1. Recipe Recommendations: Safeway knows what’s in my cupboard. AllRecipes knows what to do with it. Bring the two together and have a “Suggested Recipes based on your purchases” page. Recommend additional purchases to tweak sales too.
2. Social Networking: Grocery shopping has long been a nascent social activity. Stores in our funky bar district have an informal “singles” night for instance. Given the number of startups that want you to social network off of your clickstream (cluztr, me.dium), why not experiment with networking off your grocery shopping? Its no more or less bizarre.
3. Discovery: This is my favorite. Just like StumbleUpon analyzes clickstreams and correlates with groups to make suggestions, Safeway could be analyzing my purchases in comparison to others to suggest new things I should try.

Business Model

Membership and traffic drive the model - good olde fashioned “stickiness.” Assuming the Safeway.com socialnetworking/discovery/recipe portal got some traction, it would be a natural venue for advertisers - a whole big whopping supply of ad inventory to complement in-store and flyer campaigns - a natural upsell for Safeway. Its also a good way to distribute incentives (coupons), run contests, etc.

Ridiculous?

Is this sort of thinking ridiculous? Personally, I’d be pumped to have access to a fully automated recipe recommender like that described above. Why don’t more of these staid bricks-and-mortar institutions experiment? They seem to be at best stuck on in the mid-nineties data-mining revolution, using data to create internal value corporately; IMHO great customer-facing opportunities are passing them by.

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