Grocery shopping is finally going online

WHEN Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt visited London this week, he gushed that Britain led the world in many online trends. His audience at Chatham House, a fancy foreign policy club, seemed taken by surprise. Mr Schmidt (who serves on The Economist Group’s board of directors) might well have presented a chart from this week’s issue. According to Datamonitor, the nation of shopkeepers leads in online grocery shopping. This is surprising, since the next-hungriest web shoppers, South Korea and Japan, are more connected and hyper-urban; one might have presumed that they would order more. In America, the share of online grocery purchases is a third of Britain’s level. Wooing clicks is sensible. The Boston Consulting Group notes that shoppers who become online converts spend 30% more. (See the full article in this week's edition.)