World's first virtual grocery store

     One of the things I like to follow is where new technologies are taking us.  Our world is becoming digital in ways that few of us could image a few years ago.  Few areas have changed as much as the retail industry.  Amazon has put many booksellers out of business.  Newspapers and magazines are struggling to remain viable.   Last week I saw a report on a virtual supermarket that put a new spin on how we may shop in stores in the future. Virtual stores can be located anywhere we happen to be.  Items can be shipped to your home on a same day basis.
      Just for some perspective on how far we have come in our digital world here are some facts from NPR about life in 1984:
8% of people in the US had computers
10 years before Amazon
20 years before smartphones

 Here is the article.

"World's First Virtual Shopping Store opens in Korea. All the Shelves are infact LCD Screens. User Choose their desired items by touching the LCD screen and checkout at the counter in the end to have all their ordered stuff packed in bags.When Tesco opened a virtual supermarket on a subway platform in South Korea, it was a revolution in grocery shopping. Now they’ve teamed up with Samsung to open a more robust version of the same concept in Seoul. The store, in Seoulleung subway station, is larger than the original platform shopping stop but shares the same premise: pictures of products are posted with QR codes underneath. Shoppers use their smartphones to scan the QR codes of the items they want. The products in their virtual shopping carts are delivered right to the customers’ homes at their selected delivery time. With some 500 products in the “store,” shoppers can replenish all of their essentials while going about their daily routines, no special trips to the supermarket required. Of course, there is something to be said for picking up a product, reading its packaging, or examining it before deciding to purchase it. But for familiar and well-loved products you’ve already been using for years, the virtual store is a fantastically futuristic time-saver."