Skip to main content

South Korean supermarket chain opens virtual grocery stores in subways

home-plus-virtual-subway-supermarket-stores
Image used with permission by copyright holder

One inventive South Korean supermarket chain is using technology to completely change the way we buy groceries. Noticing that it was a distant second in the grocery store market in Korea, Tesco embarked on an innovative ad campaign to get people to use its online shopping services, reports Technology Review (via Laughing Squid).

The first step: it changed its name to “Home Plus.” After the rebranding, it began installing supermarkets inside subway stations. But these weren’t actual stores. Instead, Home Plus posted up precise picture recreations of its grocery store isles in areas where pedestrians would normally spend time waiting for their subway train to arrive. Using scannable QR codes and a smartphone app, people could actually buy their groceries from the virtual store and have them delivered to their doorstep by the time they arrive at home. Cool? You betcha.

The virtual grocery store has attracted more than 10,000 new customers and boosted Home Plus’s online sales by 130 percent. The retailer is now number one online and a very close 2nd in physical grocery sales in South Korea. With Amazon and Walmart already working on home food delivery services here in the United States, it may only be a matter of time before an idea like this springs up in a subway near you.

“For sure, your cell phone will be the graphical user interface to the shopping services,” Abel Sanchez, research lead at MIT’s Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory told TR. “Think of the early days of the Web versus today. In the early 1990s, the Web was one way, like a paper book. Today, the Web is full of interaction; it’s how we do our jobs. I think the supermarket will go through a similar transformation.”

Would you mind shopping for a few groceries as you wait for the train to come in?

Jeffrey Van Camp
Former Digital Trends Contributor
As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more