A few hours into the blizzard of 2010 my roommate and I decided to go to Giant to stock our room with junk food for the weekend. The supermarket scene resembled a documentary you'd watch about the safari on the Discovery Channel. While it took about 20 minutes to make it down the two glorious snack food isles the check out lines were a journey we could only take on if we opened a bag of chips and sat on the floor. We scanned all the isles to find the line with the shortest amount of people and it happened to be the self check out lanes. Standing in line indulging in a bag of Doritos I noticed how much faster the self-checkout lines were going than the lines with an actual human being checking people out. Spending some time people watching in line, I couldn't help but notice the demographic of ages in the lines. There was not one elderly person in the self-checkout lines but they were the majority of the people in the normal ones. This got me thinking about issues we talked about in class this week on the digital divide, were the elderly people not using the self-checkout lines because they didn't know how to use the technology? It was obvious that these lines were moving significantly faster than the normal lanes, and who finds joy in standing in line at the supermarket? I think this was a great representation of how the digital divide in separating people in all areas of life. With the fairly new "Peapod Delivery" feature of Giant customers can point click on items they want which will be delivered to there door in a matter of days. I'm sure not many senior citizens are even aware that this service is even offered. But consider how much benefit and convenience Peapod could bring to the elderly who have a hard time making it to the grocery store to get there own groceries. While this feature is readily available to anyone with an internet connection, not everyone is technologically savvy enough to navigate themselves through it. So has the digital divide separated us from the a large portion of senior citizens because their lack of experience with new developments in technology?
I went to Giant as well yesterday and it was awful. Somehow I spent over two hours there (most of that time in line) and left with only donuts, funfetti cake, and chewy bars. That is an interesting point about Peapod. I thought it was invented so that elderly people could get food delivered to them, but how are they all expected to go online and order it if they don't know how to use computers?
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