When I decided to unleash my random samplings of What’s Cool on an unsuspecting internet audience, whether they wanted it or not, I was hoping that every so often I could find some gems that were so Shut Up Cool that no one would even dare disagree with me. Things that would, for a brief moment, make me the Finder of All Things Cool, at least in my own head, and for at least one full hour. Cool things so cool that the President would need to use his special cool BatPhone to call me and say thank you for making the world a cooler place. The kind of things that would allow me to use the word Cool 40 times in one paragraph and not annoy anyone because the thing was so cool.
That kind of Cool.
I just didn’t think I would have to buy a subway pass to Korea to do it.
Check out the vid down below. Korean grocery store chain Home Plus/Tesco has just made shopping for your snacks fun again. It’s a way to check things off your grocery list that until now only Comic Con attendees could have envisioned. Instead of miles and miles of Nike ads and generic Mass Transit posters, Home Plus has lined the subway platforms with wall to wall life size grocery store murals. You literally feel as tho you are pushing your wobbly wheeled cart down the ketchup aisle instead of waiting for your Metro train.
Every shelf in your favorite Korean store is there. All the basic core items that any household would need, on either side of the pond. The neato part is that every virtual item is marked with a QR code that can be snapped into your cell phone and sent to that big Home Plus cloud in the sky. Instead of standing around twiddling your thumbs waiting for your ride home, you go grocery shopping. You take scans of everything on your list. Then you pay for it with the same phone. Then you get on your train, feeling warm and fuzzy, safe in the knowledge that your groceries will be at your house by the time you get off the Jungang Line.
I know, right? Shut up.
The only flaw that I can see in this new high tech shopping is that you no longer get to (unintentionally, of course…) stand in the longest line and read your free copy of Soap Opera Digest. Which you would never do if the line wasn’t so long. But people can’t read the 10 items or under sign. Ever. And it’s the only magazine at the register. And All My Children just got cancelled.
Or so I heard. From someone else.
Gotta go. My train is here.
