Grocery Store OF THE FUTURE

I met a strange traveler on the road today. Evidently, feeling unusually tired after a marathon blogging session, he had closed his eyes in 2010 and woken up in the WORLD OF THE FUTURE. After such a long nap, he was predictably quite hungry, so I invited him over for dinner. A bit of our conversation follows:

"This is delicious! What did you call that vegetable again? And where did you get these?"

"The tomatoes are from my own garden, but the rest is from the supermarket."

"Really? I figured by 2020 those big stores would be reduced to empty lots. Their approach simply wasn't sustainable."

"There were supermarkets before just-in-time delivery systems and the more extreme food-processing innovations. There's still a need for some sort of delivery. Most people in the city don't have the free time to directly gather all the items they need for a meal. Still, I think you'll find things aren't quite as you remember. I'll show you around my local grocery store after dinner, you'll see what I mean."

Later, at the supermarket:

"This place is quite a bit smaller than it looks."

"About half of the building is storage. Non-perishables don't get delivered on such a regular basis anymore, so stores are back to storing a lot more food. Perishable items get delivered more regularly, from a bunch of different sources. If you hang around during the day, you'll see all sorts of delivery vehicles, too: Biodiesel powered trucks, bicycle carts, sometimes people trekking out from the train with overloaded hiker's backpacks. Still, different suppliers deliver different things, so I don't know exactly what vegetables are in unless I check the website in advance (though I have a better idea of what sorts of things are in season than I did ten years ago). I have my email notifications set up so they'll tell me when they get fresh eggs."

"The prices are higher than I remember, but not as high as I would have expected."

"It got unpleasantly expensive for a few years. After the Farming Subsidies Improvement Bill was passed, prices jumped... kind of ironic that the end of grain subsidies meant farmers earning a decent living for the first time in a long time. Then there were the food processing layoffs and the trucker strikes. And since loss-leader staples to sell marked-up corn concentrate just didn't cut it anymore, they had no idea what to do. For a while, the store here was bartering with local farmers, taking payment in kind to keep their workers fed, accepting all sorts of scrip... now they're back to just US Dollars and the community currency."

"How did they get things sorted out?"

"Better logistics. Actually, I can claim some of the credit for that. I helped a bunch of the stores and suppliers in my area install OpenSuper."

"Your project?"

"No, no, I can't take that much credit. I did submit a few patches, fixed a few bugs. Most of the work was done by an anonymous hacker, called themselves CeresAscendent. They claimed to be a rural farmer who taught themselves Python while recovering from an injury, evidently they'd been a victim in a food riot. Probably not from the States, English didn't seem to be their first language, but no one was able to track the person down. Drove Citizen X nuts."

"Citizen X?"

"Oh, that's a wh*** other long story, I'll tell you more about them later. Back to the topic at hand: It took a few months for the learning algorithm to work, but OpenSuper sorted out a delivery schedule that allows for pretty good coverage of store shelves. Great system. Lots of detail: Takes weather forecasts into account, predicting the affect on harvest times, will adjust things if fuel is in short supply. Even recommends wh***sale and retail prices for the food, though of course stores just use those as a starting-point, they're still looking to gain a competitive advantage."

"There's a really long line at that counter, what are they selling there?"

"That's the nutritionist's counter. After the processed foods crash, there were a surprising number of people living on apples and cold canned fish. The stores had started to fill some blank slots on their shelves with more interesting local and seasonal vegetables, but there was a high degree of spoilage because people wouldn't buy if they didn't know what something was, much less what it went with and how to prepare it. One store hit on the bright idea of hiring a dedicated nutritional expert / meal planner, had them run seminars and give shoppers personalized advice. That worked, and pretty much everyone who could afford it copied the idea. It helped that even after every grocery store started hiring, that particular market was still flooded with people looking for jobs close to home. A lot of people with PhDs in food science and decades of work experience making McDonald's fries smell more food-like found themselves brushing off textbooks and getting back to culinary and nutritional basics."

"People still need that much help?"

"Nah, but they're used to it. Sarah's part of the community now, she's like everyone's grandmother... if everyone's grandmother knew a lot of organic chemistry in addition to the generations of culinary wisdom."

[examining logos next to some of the price tags] "Greenpeace Certified Organic, Polyface Farms Zero-Input Verified, Social Justice Org Highest Labor Standards, CXPAC No-Secrets Processed... looks like the independent food certifications have really taken off!"

"Yeah, all the extra labeling is really helpful."

"Really? Seems like information overload to me."

"Technology, my friend, technology." [takes out a device that looks like an unusually flat smart-phone, makes a few gestures at it] "I've got this app, EcoSage. I can just take a picture here..." [points the phone in the direction of a price label, gives it a slight shake] "It reads all those certification labels, processes the information based on a database of ecological and social justice factors. Cross-references all that other information on the pricing label, too, makes inferences based on the source and type of product. For example, if I point it at these local tomatoes, here" [shows screen, the top of which reads 87.2] "On the other hand, if I point it at one of the luxury out-of-season items" [points it at a label reading "Avacados, Imported from Guatemala, $12.00 each", screen now reads 27.5] "That's mostly due to the shipping, I think" [gestures, looks at a more detailed chart on the screen] "Yup. This supplier had a much lower rating before. Some doc**ents were leaked that revealed their labor practices basically amounted to slave labor. Few people wanted to buy when that warning popped up on their screen, and only a dramatic reorganization, verified by independent NGOs, prevented them from being cut off by their buyers entirely."

"People really pay that much attention?"

"A lot of existing food regulations were loosened during the food crisis, to encourage small farms to develop in innovative ways. The idea was that better availability of information could handle the same problems previously handled by regulation, transparency instead of bureaucracy. But of course the media hyped up every food scare, so people got in the habit of checking their food sources very carefully."

The conversation continued on to other topics, and the errant time-traveler stayed at my place for a few weeks while getting his temporal footing. But then I found him gone, with just a thank-you note saying he'd headed off to the other side of the country. Evidently he'd received some sort of urgent call?