I’ve been thinking a lot recently about super markets. As I cruise up and down the aisles, indulging in one of my favourite pastimes of telling the tsunami of information flow over me without any pressure to take it in. It’s almost as if it is scouring the accumulated excess information of the week off me.

I’ve been thinking mainly about the services that super markets could provide over and above selling food.

There are lots of examples of them taking big initiatives, the first that comes to mind is Tesco’s foray into banking, insurance, clothes etc. The thing that most interest me is their access to information. They’ve been onto this for a really long time, US supermarket Dollar General¹ makes a big chunk of its money from selling big information about consumers, but the interesting, and currently unexploited end of the market is small information.

This really hit home while listening to an old in our time about ageing². Old people are the perfect audience for online grocery shopping, but the websites that supermarkets put together themselves don’t seem to be designed with the older population in mind (I’m not totally convinced that they’re designed with any users in mind!). It seems pretty reasonable not to make your website oldie friendly, they are small proportion of the population, they are perceived to be technophobic, and they operate with a different stock of metaphors to young people who have grown up around scrolling and web forms.

Making a few different websites for different users seems like too much work, after all they are super markets, not web people, so here’s my idea. Why not stick to their core business, selling groceries and big data, and let the web people develop user interfaces to their api for different demographics?

That way the super markets can sell more (they could even insist on the third party interfaces using their proprietary customer identification systems to keep the flow of demographic data tidy), the developers could take a cut of their sales, and more areas of society could gain access to the wonders of online shopping. It would push innovation in shop front design, in design for different types of users, and would also make it possible to develop apps that have nothing to do with shopping as a process of buying things, but could be more about knowing about your shopping (pantry apps, nutrition apps etc.)³.

Ocado is doing something similar in the UK, but they have a monopoly position on the Waitrose database and they do their own delivery service.

Having an amazing supermarket api would be a big deal, I wonder who’s going to try it first?