Supermarket Sweep

The idea

Supermarket Sweep will help supermarkets build new service innovations that reduce unnecessary car ownership in cities. We will engage digital innovation teams with major retailers and public policy makers (boroughs and mayor-office level) to agree on a set of services that could be introduced that incentivizes consumers to discard with their ‘supermarket cars’. We will quantify the scale of the opportunity through a consumer research campaign based on social media tools. We will then task product and service design entrepreneurs to work with politicians and retailers to forge new business models and subsidy arrangements, followed by the creation of product and service concepts for adoption by retailers.

What social need does it address?

Many people who live in cities own and run a car primarily to visit the supermarket. This means that in a city such as London, residential streets are packed with largely unused vehicles which constrain flows of traffic, make life less safe for pedestrians and make it impossible to introduce new road space for smaller, lighter vehicles such as bicycles and Segways (whom we advise). Supermarkets and major retailers such as IKEA could harness the potential of digital services to deploy a range of alternatives for shoppers, including new kinds of taxi service, car sharing, ‘free car’ offers using car sharing platforms, money off credits based on journey type, bicycle storage or sharing and enhanced kinds of home delivery service. By working in partnership with public authorities, new financial incentives could be negotiated to incentivize consumers to use other methods to visit the retailer. Retailers would benefit by increasing the commercial return on the land they own, versus the return they gain from using the space as a car park.

What’s new about it?

We’ve been researching the role of cars in cities for over five years and no one has made a coordinated and substantial effort to address this opportunity. A range of new technologies are now usable and affordable that make creating new mobility services a profitable and life-improving opportunity. At the same time, the utility of cars in cities is declining as congestion charges, traffic calming, congestion, expensive and constrained parking make driving in town a real headache for many people. The time for this idea is now.

What inspired you?

The Movement Design Bureau is a global think tank, based in London. We spend our lives following mobility trends and innovations in key cities around the world. This is one of the projects we have been developing in our research lab. We believe it is one of the most useful ways of freeing up street space. London is the only place this could be trialed today, because we are the first to have a congestion charge. But the opportunities to deploy it elsewhere in future are significant.

Idea submitted by Mark Charmer

Mark is CEO of The Movement Design Bureau, a London-based think tank.