The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Having just read my colleague Tim Parry’s post about Stop & Shop’s new Scan It! technology and the wonders of self-checkout at the grocery store, I felt compelled to put in my two cents on this topic.

The store I frequent most – an A&P Fresh that used to be a Food Emporium that is horribly overpriced because it’s in a shopping center where the rents are exorbitantly high – just recently installed several of these next generation “self-checkout” stations.

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My wife went to the grocery store yesterday and came home complaining that it took her an extra five minutes to go through all the varieties of Tropicana orange juice to find the one we usually buy – which is the classic one without pulp.

You see, they just changed the design of the carton, and it’s now even harder to tell the varieties apart. Or maybe you just have to get used to it …

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Now, more than ever, media coverage matters. Even though we supposedly control the flow of information we absorb, we still care most about what’s being discussed on the air/blogs/podcasts/streams. I thought about that this morning when I read in the papers (yes, actual newsprint, three of them, in fact) that Sirus/XM is on the verge of bankruptcy, and their $500 million dollar man, Howard Stern, is contemplating retirement.

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