The Quest for the Perfect ExerGame

Thursday evening is the local late night shopping night. After picking up a couple of small items it was time to head to the grocery supermarket. There was a particularly groovy compilation of music playing and my toes where soon tapping away as I weaved my trolley up and down the aisles. I was so inspired that I even engaged in some impromptu performance art as a swung my trolley round in graceful arcs and pulled 270 and 540 degree turns.

I began to tire and switched to playing “Guess the Trolley Owner”. In this game, whenever you spot trolley coming round a corner or one that has been temporarily abandoned, you a have a split second to guess the appearance of the owner. This is not as difficult as it may seem as the relative amounts and composition of “healthy” and “unhealthy” foodstuffs can be quite revealing. We are after all to a large extent what we eat.

At the checkout the music was interrupted by an advert for a new ExerGame that will give you a high quality work out and have you looking great in now time. Nothing wrong with that, but I couldn’t help but wondering if the problem was a little closer to home. What if the store turned shopping into an ExerGame by mixing up all the items so that you had to wander round the store and hunt them down? But maybe then by spending more time in the store, people would buy more stuff and negate the increased calorie burn. But hold on, don’t supermarkets do that anyway?