For a while now, commuters in Seoul, South Korea have been able to do their grocery shopping virtually as they wait for the subway. Now Chicago’s “L” commuters are getting in on the action.
Rolled out as a pilot program in the State and Lake Station tunnel, online grocer Peapod has strewn the tunnel walls with “larger-than-life ads of grocery shelves” containing popular products. Commuters can use their smartphones to scan the barcodes of products they’d like to buy, and Peapod will deliver the products as early as the next day.
Peapod ran a similar campaign in Philadelphia back in February – the company’s first of such pilot projects – “on 15 commuter rail platforms throughout the region.” The campaign lasted for 12 weeks, with Peapod reporting a 90% reorder rate among people who scanned the ads.
The big allure for a company like Peapod has to be that this is like being able to roll out pop-up grocery stores overnight without committing to much more than a time-limited ad buy. There’s a pretty captive audience of bored, time-crunched commuters waiting for trains, too. And Given Peapod’s footprint, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see these ads in more and more places soon.
Peapod
(MORE: Virtual Market Lets Commuters in South Korea Shop for Groceries with Smartphones)