Willem314

It has been two weeks since I started work now and I have the same problem as many. Not always the time to eat properly let alone healthy. My answer is a blender!

With no more than 50 euros you go to the blender store to buy (yes really) a blender and you will have money left to pass by the supermarket to buy your favorite (and even not so favorite) fruit and vegatables. Almost everything that you find in the fruit and vegetables department will do. Bananas, tomatoes, nuts, apples even the disgusting things like lemmon and celeriac goes because the sweet fruit camouflages the taste in most cases. With some things it is recomendable to take the peal of but for the rest you just stuff in there. It is however a good idea to make sure to stay a quite a bit under the lid though, I tend to overdo it sometimes.

Then you add orange juice or milk until it reaches the highest positioned piece of fruit, you close the lid, put your blender on max  and 3 minutes later you are ready to go. Compact, not disgusting, easy to eat, quite filling and supposedly healthy in short very practical if you lack time. Only downside is of course that you cannot keep it for longer than a few days. (the advantage of orange juice over milk is that it tastes better the next days)

(Don’t know if this is even a good idea I just asumed. I’m no doctor so don’t use me as a reference for what is or is not a good idea. Do it on your own risk!)

It is stunning how we automatically assume that more is better. More money, more freedom, more choices, they all go as the basic foundation for the society we live in. You get promoted; of course you accept. Laws try to assure a maximum of market freedom, and even more choices are a direct result of this.

And whether it is figuring out which detergent to buy or bigger life questions like whether to get married or have children or not, we still tend to prefer the bigger supermarket where we have more choice.

Free market has resulted in “buying yogurt” just not being a simple task anymore. And we rarely ever find ourselves questioning this while on the long run it doesn’t necessarily make us happier. Barry Schwartz talked about this on TED:

I wonder if shops function this way: is bigger (and thus more choice) better or is small just not adapted enough? Could there be such a thing as a small quality supermarket?

Marketing wise yes, you put your prices a bit above those of your competitor, you hire somebody to keep your alleys cleaner and more organized than those of you competitor and you spread the perfume of freshly baked bread and your commercials can start spreading the word on how your brand is superior.

This often without the products in the store really changing. Meaning that sometimes the fruit at the cheaper competitor is still better and we actually find the same a brands for a bit less money as well.

How about building a smaller store with higher quality products. A selection of quality brands for a specified target group, real unpoisoned fruit and a french quality baker all wrapped into fluff of polite and helpful personnel, slightly more intelligent then elsewhere. I think we could call this a black hole in supermarket positioning, probably because it is lacking demand. We want big, we want choice.