POSTED BY DAN YOUNG

Over the summer, I had a chance to travel to Halle, Germany for a small mobile tech conference, something akin to a mini-TED in the German countryside, focused on mobile trends and topics. When the conference ended, I headed to Berlin to settle in for the better part of July.

While I there, I opted to immerse myself into the city. I had an apartment and found an office. For the rest of the trip, I was able to work as usual while taking time to experience a fantastic city.

It is always the little things that I notice when I have a chance to be in another culture. The subtle differences in people going through their daily lives are what I enjoy experiencing. Looking back on the trip, one of these experiences stood out in my mind: grocery shopping.

No one had told me this, but on my first trip to the local Kaisers “supermarket” (a shop more like a convenience store in the US), I struggled to find a shopping basket to carry my groceries. I quickly learned that I had to curtail my purchases to limit myself only to what I could carry in my arms. As I was quite hungry that trip, this wasn’t conducive to my desire to buy everything tasty in the store.

Shopping baskets had always been a transparent item to me when I shopped. It was there, and I used them, but I never paid much attention to them. When I had the chance to experience a place without them, I quickly realized how valuable an item they are. The particular Kaisers probably lost out on €10 to €20 in additional sales had I a shopping basket in which to place the goods.

When Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, they did something pretty cool. Going beyond the superficial discussion on tablet design, function, etc., what they did was create a shopping basket for the physical world.

The Kindle Fire will be sold at a loss to Amazon. Their goal is not to make money off of selling their digital shopping baskets, but to provide a significantly more convenient means for consumers to purchase and carry more goods from Amazon’s various digital stores. Amazon will undoubtedly win big in the coming years thanks to this modern twist on the grocery store shopping basket.