Shopping backwards

I was standing in the checkout of my local superstore yesterday, when I realised what a colossal waste of time it all was. Having to travel to my local superstore, select the goods, travel through the checkout, present my payment card, and then transport them back home and put them in my fridge. And I only came to the supermarket to buy a cream cake.

Why not use the Internet you might say? Many stores will ship goods to your doorstep if they were ordered using their web site. Alas, until they use retinal credit card authentication, I'm not trusting the security on these web sites. Even if I do order through a web site, I still have to order a weeks worth to make it worthwhile, and I have to wait for the delivery. I'd rather shop for individual items as and when I need them.

Modern technology can predict the weather accurately two days in advance, why not put those massive clusters of supercomputers to better use and use them to predict when I'll next desire a cream cake? Supermarkets already use computers to predict general trends in cream cake consumption, why not take the next logical step, and wire my brain up to the internet and predict an individual requirement for an individual item?

This probably all sounds like science fiction, but I predict that this will be commonplace within 10 years. You will simply desire a cream cake, and that desire would have been predicted based on your behavior patterns in the proceeding days by the CCTV system in your house, and the tracking chip embedded in your brain. Analysis of your stool will have shown any vitamin deficiencies that can be corrected by altering the constituent ingredients of the cream cake. The cake will be transported to you via a series of underground conveyor belts.

Supermarkets will be quite happy to pay for such large infrastructure developments, as they will no longer have waste cream cakes to dispose of. Alas, until the supermarkets see this massive opportunity, I have to stand in line at the supermarket queue where I am unnecessarily exposed to the public.