The Virtual Supermarket

    The supermarket is an obvious candidate for the virtual treatment. How much better to be able to order your baked beans via a PC rather than having to navigate a loaded trolley through aisles crowded with slow-moving pensioners and screaming brats. So is anyone taking the idea seriously?

    In the USA, online supermarkets are, if not exactly taking off, then at least hovering slightly above ground level. The Smart Food Co-op http://foodcoop.com/, for example, serves the MIT campus and its immediate environs in the Boston area. Although it's got a colourful home page with a graphical representation of a shopping trolley, it doesn't do anything excessively dweeby, such as saying: 'Click here to see . gif image of carrot.' Instead, customers browse textual product listings, searching goods by alphabetical order or by category. There are over 1,500, including meat, dairy products, seafood and vegetables. You can enter the word 'pasta', for instance, and the system will display a list of all durum wheat-related products. Then you simply click on those you want, and the selected items are 'loaded' into your virtual shopping basket. Thereafter, if you live on the MIT campus, the stuff will be delivered to your door. If you live nearby, you can collect the packed grocery bags from a central depot. Payment is COD.