Online shopping has changed retail (零售) forever. Most of us wouldn’t know what to do without it. But the e-commerce revolution seems to have missed an industry—groceries. Why aren’t we making our most important shopping trip easier?

The issue isn’t so much that grocers don’t want to be creative. Until recently, many grocers couldn’t afford the technology to support an e-commerce platform. But times are changing, and stores are adapting to meet increasing customer needs by adopting a unified commerce approach.

Grocery shopping is a tiring process and one that most people prefer to do as quickly as possible. However, the current state of online grocery shopping is not quite user-friendly. Maybe it’s because consumers like to touch and feel the fresh produce they’re purchasing. Maybe it’s because grocery e-commerce lacks features that clothing and other industries’ websites have—such as the ability to identify the closest store, an accurate inventory (库存), and the ability to manage large basket sizes.

E-commerce platforms can be expensive and hard to set up for grocers, but the industry is changing, and grocers need to get ready to stay competitive. The key to any successful shopping experience is a 360-view of the customer. Grocers need to invest in solutions that can gather customer information from multiple sales channels, online and off, and bring it together into one platform. Retailers should be trying their best to make shopping possible on different devices—simplifying the journey to help shoppers find what they need more easily.

Part of the reason that unified grocery commerce hasn’t taken off just yet is the fact that stores are not set up to serve different types of shoppers at once. Who is responsible for handling online orders? Should store associates put in-store shoppers or online ones first? It can get confusing for employees and customers alike. There is also the cost associated with adopting new technology in-store, such as creating apps to scan products, the ability to find the right shelf using the product locator and more.

According to Salesforce, the average retailer uses 39 different systems to manage the customer relationship. The key will be finding a way to combine these systems and analyze customer data to best serve customer needs.

Historians are often asked to examine the actions of our ancestors so we can repeat their wisdom and avoid their mistakes. But the present is just too different from the past. It is a waste of time to study Hannibal’s strategies in the Second Punic War so as to copy them in the Third World War. What worked well in cavalry battles will not necessarily be beneficial in cyber war. Studying history aims to loosen (松开) the hold of the past.

A young couple building a new home may ask the architect for a nice lawn (草坪) in the front yard. Why a lawn? “Because lawns are beautiful,” the couple might explain. But why do they think so?

The idea of growing a lawn at the entrance to private houses and public buildings was born in the castles of French and English aristocrats in the late Middle Ages. Well-kept lawns demanded land and a lot of work. In exchange, they produced nothing of value. The neat grass at the entrance to castles was a social position symbol nobody could pretend to have. Later the new parliaments (议会), supreme courts, presidential residences increasingly showed their power in row upon row of neat green grass. Humans came to identify lawns with political power, social position and economic wealth.

When you now come to plan your dream house, you might think twice about having a lawn in the front yard. You are of course still free to do it. But you are also free to shake off the cultural cargo given to you by the upper class. This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to guess the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine different lives. Of course this is not total freedom — we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

Between 30 and 40 percent of food produced for humans never gets eaten in the USA, ending up in landfills (垃圾填埋场), where it breaks down and produces greenhouse gases. Now, Elena Belavina, a professor from Cornell University, has an interesting solution. He says that opening more grocery (食品杂货) stores could reduce (减少) food waste greatly.

People of most US cities don’t have enough choices when it comes to grocery shopping, which means that people will overbuy when visiting a store. They buy more than what they can really eat, which means food goes to waste. However, when there are more stores in a neighborhood, people will shop daily or many times a week, buying just what they need, which means less food goes to waste.

For example, Belavina found that in Chicago, adding just three or four markets within a 10-square-kilometer area reduced food waste by 6 percent to 9 percent. Europe (and much of the rest of the world) is famously good at this, with stores meeting shoppers’ different needs, such as bread, cheese, meat and produce.

Belavina’s research did find that increasing the number of grocery stores would lead to more food waste by sellers, but this is less than food waste produced by customers. “We at home throw away 10 times more food than the grocery stores,” she said. This is why focusing on solutions to reducing life rubbish will have a greater help than focusing on sellers. Belavina suggests that when adding more stores isn’t workable, people should explore other shopping methods such as online orders. “Any service that makes it easier and allows you to shop more often is helpful. To reduce food waste, what people need to do is bring fewer groceries home.”