Virtual underground shopping: shopping virtually, underground…

With a population of fewer than 50 million people that includes more than 10 million smartphone owners, the South Korean Tesco network, Home Plus, rolled out virtual underground stores in an attempt to boost online sales.

Tube walls were plastered with posters of grocery items with QR codes, enabling commuters to do their food shop while waiting for the train. And when it came, shopping could be continued, with deliveries arranged within minutes or hours rather than days.

As most of the major UK supermarkets already have mobile apps for online ordering, the jump from this to a virtual shop seems small. But what Home Plus does that mobile apps fail to do is bring the act of shopping to the consumer on an automatic level. It might seem quite forced – we’re sure it would feature in a present-day adaptation of 1984 – but that’s not to say it doesn’t work.

Sales for Home Plus saw an increase of 130 per cent in three months, with the number of registered online users rising by 75 per cent. Home Plus is now number one for online grocery shopping in Korea, coming a close second to offline first-placed E-Mart.

For Home Plus to work on the UK underground, networks would have to be integrated with the internet, not to mention the fleet of delivery vans on standby. With the Olympics less than a year away – and throwing our unrealistic demands out of the window – this could be something that would make for an interesting journey on the Jubilee Line.