For those of us for whom multitasking is a high art, a South Korean retail experiment combining grocery shopping with commuting looks like a godsend.
In a bid to boost online sales, grocery retailer Tesco covered the walls of a Korean subway station with photos of its merchandise arranged on store shelves. Each item was endowed with a QR code, those black-and-white squares recognized by smartphones, and commuters on their way in to work could snap pictures of the codes with phones to fill a virtual shopping cart. They paid for their items via an app, and the food was delivered to their homes after they got home from work.
No after-work grocery shopping crush, no squeaky-wheeled carts, no post-apocalyptic check-out lines. Just a little less time devoted to playing Angry Birds on the platform.
In terms of technology, nothing here is new: QR codes have been around since the 90s and began to appear on ads soon after the advent of smartphones, and grocery shopping online with services like Peapod is old (fifteen-year-old) news. But this appears to be the first time the two have been combined.
It’s certainly a more constructive use for QR codes ...
