June 5, 2000
DOWN HOME:
What's the price of a cart filled with cybergroceries?
______Looks like I'm still going to be hauling myself up to the store for milk for the foreseeable future.
Marv Knox
Editor
___For awhile there, I thought we were about to become a cybergrocery family. But in the immortal words of the famous 20th century philosopher John Belushi, "Naaaah."
___Just the other day, cybergroceries seemed our destiny.
___It started with a conversation we had with our friends Bill and Sharon. Seems they recently bought groceries over the Internet and had a wonderful experience.
___"The produce was excellent," Bill said. "And the meats were very good too."
___"The only problem was that it took me a long time to shop," Sharon said, vocalizing the tiniest bit of foreboding, which we should have taken seriously.
___Shopping for cybergroceries is fairly easy, Sharon explained. You log on to the grocery site and browse the categories to fill your cybergrocery cart with what apparently is cyberfood. You give the cybergrocer your home information and credit card number and tell the cybergrocery delivery guy when to bring the stuff.
___The next day, voila!, the food arrives at your home.
___"The thing I like best is you don't even have to carry the groceries in from the car," Sharon said. I'd be grateful not to have to push around a grocery cart with an errant wheel that wants to go west when you're trying to push the cart south.
___Our sense of grocery destiny grew two days later, when our friends Marc and Vicki reported they, too, had shopped online.
___"Well, it does take awhile to find everything you want to buy," Vicki confided.
___"But, hey, you don't have to go to the store," Marc countered.
___That night, I got tired and went to bed before Joanna finished pushing her cybercart around the cybersupermarket that exists somewhere within or beyond our computer.
___Forty-five minutes later, Jo came to bed. Mad. She couldn't buy the yogurt I like and the breakfast bars Lindsay likes, and the cybergrocer denied the cybercredit the cybermarketer had promised. So, she logged off, leaving a full cybercart somewhere in the middle of a cyberaisle.
___Someday, we'll probably buy our groceries online, but not now.
___The next morning, I thought about all this cyberbusiness. And I remembered a story I read about people who are trying to have cyberchurch with a virtual congregation.
___No matter what computers can and will do, people need people. That's the way the gospel is shared. That's the way love grows. That's the way faith matures. And that's the way you find the right kind of yogurt.
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