Google shopping
We strap on Google Glass to see if it’ll help us get through our grocery list
We strap on Google Glass to see if it’ll help us get through our grocery list.
Last week, I went to the Whole Foods at 1522 N. Kingsbury to see how the ballyhooed Google Glass might alter the way we shop for groceries.
My guide was Manny Almagro, the vice president of digital technology at TPN Retail, a marketing firm whose clients include Tropicana. His job is to understand how people buy stuff, and then dream up technology that makes shopping easier. He holds a patent for software that delivers digital media into stores (like digital menu boards). Almagro wears Glass about five hours a day, including every time he goes grocery shopping.
I try the Google hangout capability in front of a selection of greenish bananas. Almagro patches me through to Marc Lapides, a former co-worker of Almagro’s at TPN. I can see him OK in the top corner of the lenses, but I can barely hear his ad- vice as I hold up different hands of bananas.
Lapides is now the director of marketing at Cosi. I asked him the next day about whether Cosi might be interested in designing its own Glass app. “We don’t see any really good business case to build something for Google Glass,” he says. “It needs to go beyond novelty.”
Grocery stores don’t seem to be nursing big plans either. Whole Foods says it hasn’t thought much about Glass, and Mariano’s says it’s not on the radar.
In fact, grocery stores may not welcome the prospect of a more educated consumer, which grocery analyst David J. Livingston says Glass will produce, citing potential for instant comparison shopping. “Now, you’ve got another tool to kind of get one up on the store,” Livings- ton says.
Almagro steers me from the produce section to liquor, where I use the voice search function to ask for a whiskey that’s made in Chicago. The Wikipedia page for Koval Distillery appears. Lo and behold, there’s a Koval white whiskey, one row down, $33 for a fifth.
And when we come upon a Thanksgiving display, Almagro instructs me to touch the frame and say, “OK, Glass. How many calories are in cranberry sauce?” Eighty-six in a 1-ounce serving, it tells me.
I look at the label on the back of a jar, which says 90. I’m impressed, but wonder why, in a store full of FDA-mandated nutritional information, I’d need a digital headset to check calorie counts.
Glass is clunky. It’s hard to hear through the earpiece. Users and designers alike often struggle to explain how many of the problems Glass solves were actual problems in the first place.
But then Almagro shows me Word Lens, an app that translates signs within a few seconds of registering them. A boatload of use cases immediately come to mind. You could use Glass to translate pharmaceutical regimens and electoral ballots. It would widen the province of ethnic groceries. And if it can scan text so easily, how hard would it be to build an inventory of products containing nuts, or trans fats?
“Glass will take the control out of the retailers’ hands and put it into the consumers’,” Almagro says. “It exerts pressure to be more transparent and healthier.”
For now, this is the magic of Glass 1.0. Not what is, but what could be.