What Are The Greatest Changes In Shopping In Your Lifetime

What are the greatest changes in shopping in your lifetime? So asked my 9 year old grandson.

As I thought of the question the local Green Grocer came to mind. Because that is what the greatest change in shopping in my lifetime is.

That was the first place to start with the question of what are the greatest changes in shopping in your lifetime.

Our local green grocer was the most important change in shopping in my lifetime. Beside him was our butcher, a hairdresser and a chemist.

Looking back, we were well catered for as we had quite a few in our suburb. And yes, the greatest changes in shopping in my lifetime were with the small family owned businesses.

Entertainment While Shopping Has Changed
Buying butter was an entertainment in itself.
My sister and I often had to go to a favourite family grocer close by. We were always polite as we asked for a pound or two of butter and other small items.

Out came a big block of wet butter wrapped in grease-proof paper. Brought from the back of the shop, placed on a huge counter top and included two grooved pates.

That was a big change in our shopping in my lifetime… you don’t come across butter bashing nowadays.

Our old friendly Mr. Mahon with the moustache, would cut a square of butter. Lift it to another piece of greaseproof paper with his pates. On it went to the weighing scales, a bit sliced off or added here and there.

Our old grocer would then bash it with gusto, turning it over and over. Upside down and sideways it went, so that it had grooves from the pates, splashes going everywhere, including our faces.

My sister and I thought this was great fun and it always cracked us up. We loved it, as we loved Mahon’s, on the corner, our very favourite grocery shop.

Grocery Shopping
Further afield, we often had to go to another of my mother’s favourite, not so local, green grocer’s. Mr. McKessie, ( spelt phonetically) would take our list, gather the groceries and put them all in a big cardboard box.

And because we were good customers he always delivered them to our house free of charge. But he wasn’t nearly as much fun as old Mr. Mahon. Even so, he was a nice man.

All Things Fresh
So there were very many common services such as home deliveries like:

• Farm eggs

• Fresh vegetables

• Cow’s milk

• Freshly baked bread

• Coal for our open fires

Delivery Services
A man used to come to our house a couple of times a week with farm fresh eggs.

Another used to come every day with fresh vegetables, although my father loved growing his own.

Our milk, topped with beautiful cream, was delivered to our doorstep every single morning.

Unbelievably, come think of it now, our bread came to us in a huge van driven by our “bread-man” named Jerry who became a family friend.

My parents always invited Jerry and his wife to their parties, and there were many during the summer months. Kids and adults all thoroughly enjoyed these times. Alcohol was never included, my parents were teetotallers. Lemonade was a treat, with home made sandwiches and cakes.

The coal-man was another who delivered bags of coal for our open fires. I can still see his sooty face under his tweed cap but I can’t remember his name. We knew them all by name but most of them escape me now.

Mr. Higgins, a service man from the Hoover Company always came to our house to replace our old vacuum cleaner with an updated model.

Our insurance company even sent a man to collect the weekly premium.

People then only paid for their shopping with cash. This in itself has been a huge change in shopping in my lifetime.

In some department stores there was a system whereby the money from the cash registers was transported in a small cylinder on a moving wire track to the central office.

Some Of The Bigger Changes
Some of the bigger changes in shopping were the opening of supermarkets.

• Supermarkets replaced many individual smaller grocery shops. Cash and bank cheques have given way to credit and key cards.

• Internet shopping… the latest trend, but in many minds, doing more harm, to book shops.

• Not many written shopping lists, because mobile phones have taken over.

On a more optimistic note, I hear that book shops are popular again after a decline.

Personal Service Has Most Definitely Changed
So, no one really has to leave home, to purchase almost anything, technology makes it so easy to do online.
And we have a much bigger range of products now, to choose from, and credit cards have given us the greatest ease of payment.

We have longer shopping hours, and weekend shopping. But we have lost the personal service that we oldies had taken for granted and also appreciated.

Because of their frenetic lifestyles, I have heard people say they find shopping very stressful, that is grocery shopping. I’m sure it is when you have to dash home and cook dinner after a days work. I often think there has to be a better, less stressful way.

My mother had the best of both worlds, in the services she had at her disposal. With a full time job looking after 9 people, 7 children plus her and my dad, she was very lucky. Lucky too that she did not have 2 jobs.

Certain Online Marketing Stratagems That Are Essential in 2017

Online marketing has imposed a big impact on both the smaller & bigger organizations. In fact, it is actually wiping out the traditional marketing through its approach. The concept of online marketing is also relative and varies from organization to organization depending on their amplitude, work culture & capital. With a lot of techniques that belong to different categories, online marketing has a bouquet of strategies for all the organizations, whether small or large, whether with a huge capital investment not.A big part of the online marketers think that online marketing is limited to SEO, SMO & SEM, where in reality, a lot of other online marketing strategies have already arrived at the end of 2016 and some of them are still coming since the beginning of 2017. So, as the field of online marketing is quite vast and very much volatile, therefore, the biggest online marketing experts always do the experiment and upgrade themselves to cope up with these changes.But geniuses are geniuses and we can’t wait for being one of them without doing nothing. So, before we lose the game and stay backward, here are certain strategies for you that are dominantly impacting the field of online marketing in the present year of 2017 too!Voice searchNot to say much, Google itself is emerging to the voice call search process. As online marketing majorly works around the search protocol, so the evolution of this latest search technique makes the game easier! Search by voice takes comparatively lesser time and freedom to choose the language users to want and is practically a very optimized method than the general search because it is easier and rapid in terms of showing results on the SERPs. With the rapid growth of voice search on the smartphones over almost all the countries of the world, the reach of this type of search has grabbed half the world of online marketing with its flexibility, smoothness and facilitated terms & conditions.Niche Content CurationGoogle now supports GIFs & videos on the SERPs that directly approach the viewers once they open the page. Once any topic is searched, along with the text contents and images, videos and GIF files also open up to optimize the understanding of the users. The crawler of Google crawls the websites and find out the videos and GIFs and when anyone searches for the niche term, the related videos and GIFs are displayed from the cache. This process has already started in the larger portion of the USA and in the near future, it is expected that this feature will dominate the entire virtual world.Mobile Responsive MarketingThe ‘big switch’ from the big screen to the small screen, more specifically, from desktop to smartphones has compelled the invention of responsive content. As more and more people are accessing the websites through the smartphones, along with the design, the contents need to be mobile friendly. To keep pace with this change, the online marketing strategies are also evolving into being mobile responsive.Live Streaming Cuts The Snow!To redeem online marketing from its old, almost obsolete freezing mode, the social media sites have launched the live streaming in the year 2016. The concept clarifies the objective that checking out the ‘at present scenario’ of the host makes the branding strong. With the help of the faster internet facility and the omnipresence of the smartphones, live video streaming channelizes the constant flow of endorsement and grab the attention of more public. As the amenity gets more and more attention, it is to hope that in the present year, we are going to get this feature more optimized.The ‘Go Getter’ Influencer MarketingInfluencer marketing is the latest in, in the online marketing in 2016. As a consequence, more and more industries are striving to apply this strategy, but without a proper knowledge of how to leverage it for a proper business progression. As influencer marketing focuses less on the direct approach to the targeted group of customers and focuses more on the key leaders or influencers to generate more traffic to your business, it empowers the online marketing from a new perspective.Content Marketing & Dense ContentContent density is the major requirement of organic SEO services. High-quality content and proper keyword stuffing in a website helps to grab the attention of the viewers and enables the website to gain the traffic easily.The ratio of the content on a page and the size of it is referred as content density. If a web page has a higher content density rate it ranks better in the Search Engine Ranking Pages or SERPs. This is because, with a higher content density rate, the crawler crawls the website and finds it more quickly.As people have less time to read the entire article, highlighting the particular portion of the articles that can make the deal is the key to success. Dense content marketing focuses on the chosen content that helps in achieving a good deal of traffic through content marketing.

US Markets in green on Friday; Dow 30 up over 345 points, Nasdaq Composite, S&P 500 up nearly 1%

US Markets were trading in the green on Friday with Dow 30 trading at 30,678.80, up by 1.14%. While S&P 500 was trading at 3,701.66, up by 0.98% and Nasdaq Composite 10,690.60 was also up by 0.71 per cent

Twitter Facebook Linkedin
US Markets in green on Friday; Dow 30 up over 345 points, Nasdaq Composite, S&P 500 up nearly 1%
Earlier today, Indian stock markets ended the week on a winning note. It was the sixth straight gains for equity markets. Source: Reuters
US Markets were trading in the green on Friday with Dow 30 trading at 30,678.80, up by 345.25 points or1.14 per cent. While S&P 500 was trading at 3,701.66, up by 35.88 points or 0.98 per cent and Nasdaq Composite 10,690.60 was also up 75.75 points or 0.71 per cent. A Reuters report said that today’s strength was on the back of a report which said the Federal Reserve will likely debate on signaling plans for a smaller interest rate hike in December, reversing declines set off by social media firms after Snap Inc’s ad warning.

Source: Comex

Nasdaq Top Gainers and Losers

Source: Nasdaq

Earlier today, Indian stock markets ended the week on a winning note. It was the sixth straight gains for equity markets. The BSE Sensex ended at 59,307.15, up by 104.25 points or 0.18 per cent from the Thursday closing level. Meanwhile, the Nifty50 index closed at 17,590.00, higher by 26.05 points or 0.15 per cent. In the 30-share Sensex, 13 stocks gained while the remaining 17 ended on the losing side. In the 50-stock Nifty50, 21 stocks advanced while 29 declined.