214 ChaPter 9: Designing Cross-channel User experiences CaSe StUDIeS the Pervasive Supermarket After so many examples dealing with eating, drinking, or buying food, it seems only natural that we try to recompose the picture by seeing how we can apply everything we have been discussing to the design of a pervasive information architecture serving a supermarket. Call it poetic justice, but a supermarket makes for a very interesting example for a number of factors: it is something we can all relate to, as we all know how it is to go shopping for groceries; it is a place where we spend a fair amount of time; it usually deploys multichannel strategies, in the store, on paper, or on the Web; and, traditionally, it is the playfield for expertise other than that of information architects. Let's start from this last point: oddly enough, given the sheer amount of infor- mation they process and send to the customer, the very idea of an information architecture is often either undeveloped or totally absent in the design of the physical retail store. This is a point to be addressed. Browsing the rather large