Grocery Guru Episode 9: The Three Ghosts of Christmas

Join Andrew Grant and Darren A. Smith in the eighth episode of Grocery Guru: The Three Ghosts of Christmas; Past, Present and Future.

You Can Read The Full Three Ghosts of Christmas Episode Transcript Below:

Darren A. Smith:

Hello. Welcome to episode nine of the Grocery Guru. We're here with Andrew Grant.

Andrew Grant:

Hi, Darren.

Darren A. Smith:

Hello. You're looking very festive with your Christmas tree.

Andrew Grant:

Yes, look. Yeah. All nice and ready. Not a lot of presents under the tree. A bit worried. It must be these port delays that we're hearing about.

Darren A. Smith:

It must be. Now one of my favourite films is the Christmas Scrooge Muppet Carol with Michael Caine.

Andrew Grant:

Yeah. Michael Caine.

Darren A. Smith:

Now I've said that because I've set you up in the... I don't know, you want to talk about the three ghosts, is that right?

Let's about the three ghosts...

 

Andrew Grant:

Yeah. No, the Christmas Carol. Yes. Charles Dickens, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. They visited Scrooge on Christmas Eve and yeah, I think this is really aimed at, I guess, at account managers, because obviously, the Ghost of Christmas Past, both you and I as buyers used to see, I don't know, what 20 account managers a week?

Darren A. Smith:

Yeah, yeah. Or more. Yeah, yeah. The whole variety. Yeah.

Andrew Grant:

They'd spend their day driving down the M1, they'd turn up with that Greggs sausage roll pastry on their suit. They'd have a nice half-hour chat with us. We might even give them a cup of coffee. And then they're off to have a sleep in the lay-by for the afternoon.

Darren A. Smith:

They were all hardworking as well.

Andrew Grant:

I'm sure they were all very hardworking but unfortunately, the fact of Christmas present is, I'm not sure there'll be a single account manager out there that has actually had a physical meeting with a buyer this year. And we've said in a couple of these episodes, haven't we, that the last nine months has compressed 10 years' worth of change to everything. To all our lives, but, just as much grocer, I think we said it with home shopping, home deliveries and now at the stage where they were expected to be in 2030, not in 2020.

Darren A. Smith:

And wasn't it the CEO of Airbnb that said something like 18 years of development has been crushed in nine months.

Andrew Grant:

Yeah. This nine months has changed our lives at warp speed. And just thinking of the account manager, nine months without a physical meeting with a buyer, lucky probably even to get Zoom meetings.

Darren A. Smith:

Yes.

Andrew Grant:

So the future, looking forward to the Ghost of Christmas Future is, and not wanting to be too bleak about it, but I think buyers have become a lot more self-sufficient, a lot less needy of their account managers in the last nine months. And I don't see that changing.

Darren A. Smith:

Well, that's very true. And also I'm just going to touch on the Ghost of Christmas Past a little more, in that those account managers, some of them are excellent at their interpersonal skills, building relationships and that's all flipped on its head where they're now trying to do it over Zoom, which is much, much harder.

Andrew Grant:

Darren, remind us of your Zoom statistic. Why is Zoom so difficult?

Darren A. Smith:

Well, Zoom's difficult because the eye can see 576 million pixels. Now that just means we're in higher resolutions. When I see you face to face, you're in high resolution, I can see all the corners of your mouth changing, your eyebrows raised, all those nonverbal cues that could be an idea of what you're doing or what you're really saying. But over here, my laptop's running about a million pixels, maybe a million and a half. So it's like watching someone through a fog. I can't see all the little changes that you're making that give me the idea of what you really mean.