Just a quick post with an idea for grocery deliveries.
On occasion I have used the shopping delivery service that some of the big stores now offer. The trouble is, at up to five pounds extra for delivery (depending on the delivery slot you choose) it adds a lot to the cost.
This morning i got to thinking, why don’t they offer a service where you can share the delivery cost? This is how it should work when they have implemented it.
Step one – start a neighbours club on the stores website.
Step two – tell all of your neighbours what you have done and give them your club details. A nice email to neighbours button would do the trick.
Step three – every time you order your shopping and pick a delivery slot you will notice a difference. The slots that your neighbours already have booked for will be highlighted. Simply choose one of the same slots for a reduced delivery charge.
It is a simple idea but it would give the store a great way to pull in new customers as well as reducing the delivery time and mileage and fuel costs. Everybody wins.
I am going to pass on the idea to Tesco’s and see if they give me a years free groceries as a prize – I might as well be optimistic, after all, every idea helps. Especially when it’s an idea that helps a little towards building a “big society”.
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Advertising shouldn’t be allowed on a site like this, especially for multi-nationals like T**c*, but then its your site, so i guess you can feel free.
Ideas like that are ‘nice’ but you’d need some initiative to back up the idea, and more work than you think.
There are droves of ideas like this one around covering a myriad of areas but little in the way of working models.
Does anyone have any concrete examples of working models in this respect?
Hi Eimhin,
thank you for your comment.
I am a software engineer by trade so i have a pretty good idea of what would be involved. While it would not be trivial i can’t see why it would be difficult for the big stores to add to their existing online shopping systems with the resources that they have.
I suspect from the way that you refer to the multi nationals that you don’t approve of them. In some ways I agree that they lead to exploitation and social issues. On the other hand, the modern efficiencies that we have achieved in the world in science, technology and logistics etc etc allow us to maintain the standard of living that we now have today.
I don’t think that many people would want to return to a world where we don’t have companies like these stores and those that provide the products for them.
This small idea would make a small difference to the overall efficiency of the system. It is generally lots of small ideas and the occasional bigger ones that make the system continually improve.
On the other side of the coin we also need to ensure that business is carried out reasonably fairly for everyone with laws and rules but we should not go so far as to remove the mechanisms that modern society relies on.
It is the fact that Spiral Dynamics gives us a framework to look at the needs of different groups of people that makes me feel that is so powerful. We have to balance the needs of individuals, families, companies and the bigger world in a complex mesh of requirements. And the task is not getting any easier.
Whilst I like the idea of supermarkets cutting fuel costs (CO2 emmissions) considering most neighbours don’t know each other I’m not sure this is workable.
And, our supermarket bill is more than £100 so by the time you’ve takenm into account your fuel bill and time visiting a store, then a £5 delivery charge seems quite reasonable.
Matthew
Hi Matthew,
i don’t think the idea would need to work for everyone. Lets just say that 25 percent of people who use a delivery service started using this. And that it also attracted 10 percent of new people as well because the delivery charges become less.
Those new customers make whoever does this first a lot more money. And, it makes a significant difference to CO2 emmisions.
Yes, £5 is a reasonable amount for delivery at peak times but that is not reason not to improve the system.
In fact, i just realised that the stores could even do this without asking people to join clubs. Simply adjusting delivery charges for slots where people with similar post codes have already ordered.
However, isn’t it a shame that people don’t know their neighbours? Just think of the marketing angle that the first person to do this could get by launching a Big Society Neighbours Clubs system. The delivery service would be just one of the possibilities for such clubs. They might even might be a small step towards reversing the growing isolation of people from their own communities.
Which leads me on to another post soon about Big Society…
Hi John,
I’m just a bit sore about the way bigger companies, multi-nationals especially, take economic resources out of local and national economies by undercutting prices of local producers. There is no alleigance beyond the shareholder or the board and more often than not the mechanism of growth in these scenarios is spurred on by greed rather than social responsibility.
Now in saying that, I am currently working on a fund-raising effort to open a youth-café in the town I’m originally from and this same aforementioned organisation have pledged a significant sum to our annual fund due to the store-manager’s emotional connection to his workplace where a youth suicide devastated the entire store’s workforce for a time. And so I realise that it is not all bad.
I also realise that more often than not this is the exception to the rule and that there should be legally binding regulations that enforce a profit-proportioned societical/cultural contribution from these companies.
I also think the ‘neighbours clubs’, a name that presupposes little in the way of mutual advantage, could be better constructed as a specific mechanism to enhance the capacity for production, and cultural growth within a community. For example, think of the many toolboxes in a given town. There is no realistic need for 2,000 hammers in a small town, and 2,000screw drivers and so on. Why can people not see their way through to self-organising local facilities that, by virtue of pooling their resources, increase their capacity to produce.
By this I mean that in the case of a local tool bank from which people can draw according to their need, their pooling of cost means there will be significantly large sums left over for the purchase of tools and machines which by themselves, individuals could never have afforded, thus expanding a local communities growth potential.
Linking this mechanism with local groups, like youth cafés or social clubs for instance, can thus enable fund-raisers that are ‘beyond charity’ in that they use local resources to improve the local environment by conducting works of restoration, landscaping etc.
Also this mechanism could link to the social-welfare system in that some kind of work rota which, like Jury-duty, randomly selects people to work with their local authorities, not to mention, in other guises, countless other applications of this ideology.
These principles are based on the properties of self-organisation revealed in studies of natural organisms. We have rooted in the human psyche, an inherently bottom-up organisational impulse which is denied in the current framework of society resulting in our disequilibrium with our environment. We find ourselves the most disrupting species on the planet where we have the potential to be the most harmonising.
We must find the incorruptable among us, those with the vision and the drive to create the reality which we can see and sculpt this world from the future of possibility into the actuality of presence.
…(E)…