The COVID Effect!

I’m writing this post looking out of my apartment window at the New York City skyline! I recently moved into a new apartment outside of New York City, right around when the COVID pandemic began. Being in the tri-state area, I was able to witness the impact of the pandemic on daily life up-close and in-person. I have wanted to write about COVID in one of my early blogs because the nation-wide shutdown is the primary reason I found time to start this site.

Today, I drove to a Wegmans grocery store in Brooklyn, NY. I saw two major impacts of the pandemic that inspired me to post this today. First off, it took me 18 minutes to drive from Jersey City to Brooklyn during rush hour. Just to help you understand the significance of this, you have to go through Manhattan to go from Jersey City to Brooklyn and if I made this drive same time last year, it would have taken me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour! That is how empty the roads were… then I pulled up to the grocery store and noticed two separate lines of people trying to get into the store, one was about 25 people and the other was 5. After looking closely, I noticed that the longer line was specifically for InstaCart employees. For those of you who don’t know, Instacart is a company that you can order almost anything online from anywhere and the employees of the company pick it up for you and drop it off… No need to leave the comfort of your home!

I got in quickly because I was there for myself. As I stepped in, I noticed flyers everywhere about the new Wegmans Scanning mobile app that you can use to scan the items you pickup along the way to then simply pay for the scanned items at the self-checkout. The store kills two birds with one stone here- 1) it reduces the checkout time for customers dramatically to get more customers turned around in a shorter time, 2) reduces the amount of exposure customers and employees have with each other.

This simple experience got me thinking that necessity is truly the mother of invention. The COVID Pendamic has accelerated digital transformation exponentially in my eyes and rather than going back to the old “normal”, we should use this momentum to innovate even more and live a life that further intertwines technology with our day-to-day life.

I am sure this won’t be my last post about the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the world of technology and the technological revolution, but for now, I leave you with this thought… Today we are constantly complaining about how tough our lives have become because we have to stay indoors, but imagine if we were in this situation 100 years ago or 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. We should be thankful to the technological advances that have allowed us to combat this crisis in a much more comfortable way with the ability to drastically limit direct human to human interaction while still being connected to everyone AND everything!