I spend an hour a week in a supermarket, and I’m very grateful that it doesn’t take me any longer to find reliably nutrional and good-tasting food for my family.

That strange remark was prompted by reading the Good Experience newsletter from Mark Hurst. He makes the sharp remarks below about ‘authenticity.’

Link: Good Experience Blog by Mark Hurst

Authenticity is an essential ingredient of good experience. It separates the superficial from the substantial; the soulless from the humane; the isolated from the integrated; the false from the true. It’s a big idea worth exploring. But I’ll admit that authenticity can be a tricky thing to pin down. (Anyone want to take a crack at "What is truth?") In fact it’s so elusive that I’ve heard some speakers on experience-design suggest that authenticity doesn’t even exist, and so we should proceed (in customer experience, design, and other fields) without it. But authenticity does exist, it is important, even essential, and we should struggle to place it in our work. We have a responsibility to explore.

Then interviews a very sharp man, Ron Pompei, who proceeds to call the supermarket a ‘horrible experience’ and tout the benefits of shopping a farmers’ market.

Well, Ron Pompei clearly isn’t raising a demanding, well-educated family on a budget and a grueling schedule. But he does go on to say something true about authenticity in retailing:

Retailers should take responsibility for what they sell, so that they aren’t manipulated by the brands asking for so much shelf space. Instead, they should choose what’s best for the customer. They should be merchant, not a conveyor belt.

Well, he’s right about that. About every other month, some product I treasure is pulled from the shelf to make room for something the product marketing industry has paid big bucks to shove into my face. And my supermarket never, never asks me for my opinion about what they should carry. Humph.