power shopping
Some milleniums ago, our ancestors spent most of their time hunting or collecting the very basic things they needed in order to survive their daily struggle. Nowadays, our lives have become much easier: to satisfy our basic needs, we just need to go to a supermarket and collect what we select from a vast overflow of available goods. Some are still raw, but most are already processed in a way that we can use them right away. Actually, this is the perfection of what not all too long ago was considered as a fantasy: the 'Schlaraffenland' or 'land of cockaigne' [painting by Pieter Bruegel, 1567], a popular subject in the 16th century. From today's point of view, those then very crazy fantasies were still very very modest: They were dreaming of free food, mountains of applesauce, horses born with saddles, fish that leap out of the river offering themselves as food, cakes that bake themselves and fences made of sausages. :) In today's shopping malls, we indeed have much more: we have unlimited amount of food and we have food which would not be available if it wasn't taken from the opposite side of the globe or specially bred in greenhouses or animal farms. So, one could say we have the 'Schlaraffenland' on earth now, we don't even have to walk to the shopping center, we can comfortably drive or even order online from home...
Diametrically opposed to that development, the British supermarket chain TESCO is making shopping physically harder for their customers: Earlier this year, they introduced the so-called 'Trim Trolley' [the Brits call their shopping carts trolleys]:
[news article]
Pushing this shopping cart can be made more strenuous by adjustable ten levels of resistance. In addition, the shopping cart has a built-in heart rate monitor and a calorie counter [TESCO is known to stuff their shopping carts with high-tech equipment: they already have shopping carts with DVD entertainment systems for nagging kids and a cart automatically calculating the price of the goods in it].
This is so paradox and one of the weirdest things I heard of lately! Making shopping harder for consumers in order to fight obesity?!? After all, why do shopping carts have wheels?? Hmmm... maybe TESCO is just using the knowledge that hungry customers buy more? ;)