A touch of human

How do you change a transaction into something more meaningful? Add what is not machine-like. Add something human.

Christopher and I regularly use online shopping to buy the groceries that we can’t source locally. No matter the location we’re ordering from (and we’ve tried this across two different countries at the same supermarket brand), the experience is the same down to the detail. We order and pay online, and like clockwork, our order will be dropped off at our door, a printed receipt packed inside one of the paper bags.

And so I smiled recently when I found this note written by hand at the top of the receipt recently. That someone had taken the extra time to somehow add something extra to the usual experience somehow meant even more than it probably should have.

It was a tiny gesture, but that tiny unscripted breaking from form - that reminder of the other human at the other end of the chain - turned the experience from a transaction into something more, something we perhaps all secretly gravitate towards: connection.