Q&A with Brenda Allen-Toon, VP Consumer Insights, Peapod Digital Labs
Editor’s note: Nancy Cox is the founder of Research Story Consulting and former CPG corporate researcher. Her work and play include words, sketchpads, cooking (not baking) and the occasional sock puppet.
Passions, hobbies, healthy distractions and even guilty pleasures – discover how the research community plays and how that plays out in their work life. In the Venn diagram of work and play, what happens when work and play overlap? Research colleagues share their work and play stories in this interview series by Nancy Cox.
Hello to Brenda Allen-Toon, VP consumer insights, Peapod Digital Labs
What is the “play” in your life?
Curiosity about crowdsourcing delivery shows up in both my professional world and my play. My play is being a DoorDash and Instacart driver. When I travel to various markets, and I’m on my own time, I’ll turn my driver apps on. What mission will come my way? These missions take me to communities, to houses and into people’s lives that I would not have the opportunity to see.
It's play when I show up and even before I ring the doorbell, I hear through the open window people running and saying, “Oh cool! Our Chipotle’s here!” It’s two guys playing pingpong and the pingpong table is the living room – no other furniture.
On the grocery delivery side, I once delivered to an elderly woman and it’s all she can do to open the door. She had indicated just to leave it at the doorstep, but I realized she wasn’t going to get the groceries in her house after taxing herself while opening the door. So, I lingered, and she started to ask, “Would you …?” Right away I could say, “Absolutely, I’ll take these in.” I took the groceries in and put them on her counter. “Do you need some help putting this away?” Yes, she’d love that. I put things away for her.
I have the luxury of time since I am not driving for a living. I can take the random mission I am given, whether it’s $10 or $20 because for me the payout can be the satisfaction of helping an elderly woman with her groceries.
That’s why this is play not work. My payout is satisfying my curiosity on a topic that fascinates me.
How has your play influenced your research work?
My driving gigs are probably a version of ethnography with no structure. I don’t choose the potential “respondents” and I don’t determine the mission. I just open up the app and the app says, “This is your mission, Brenda.”
For my work, I keep asking how much does the grocery industry really understood this whole thing called crowdsourced work? People assume it’s unemployable people who are doing this work. Which is wrong. Or people want to think about them the same as retail store employees. That’s not right either. Because the main reason drivers are doing this is flexibility. Many times, it’s to fill short-term income gaps. Is this the future of work, where work is made available for a cost and the worker chooses it at a moment’s notice?
My dream empathetic experience to understand delivery would have the researcher place an order, hop in the car of the delivery driver watching the driver accept and plan the mission. The researcher would shop with that driver then back in the car to ride along as the order is delivered to the researcher’s home. End to end. The researcher would see where it goes wrong – and where it goes well – for all three parties: themselves as a consumer, the driver/shopper and the store with potential for shelf- and product-level insight.
Of course, this experience needs to be repeated as the tech is always changing. For example, not that long ago when picking up an order at Walmart you had to pull up, look at a confusing sign then call an automated number with a menu tree where the pick-up is option 8. Now the app automatically tells Walmart when you’ve pulled in. All within the app – no old-school phone calls. Apply that tech to the Instacart worker where time is money. Why would they want to use the call-and-wait method at one retailer when another has reduced the waiting friction?
What would you tell readers who want to know more about your area of play?
If you want the experience of a crowd-sourced deliverer, it’s not difficult to get approved. It’s much easier to qualify for DoorDash, Instacart or Gopuff than for Uber where you have another human being in your car. There’s a vehicle check and an evaluation of your propensity as a driver. Remember, I’m not doing this for the money but to satisfy my curiosity.
Maybe my best advice is not about convincing other researchers that they would enjoy my play. Instead, find something that fires up your curiosity at work and think about how you can play with that to satisfy your curiosity. Play with it in a totally different way than at work. For work, I can read an USDA report on a SNAP/EBT food delivery pilot. But for play, and in turn, deeper understanding, I can experience that food security means getting the food into the pantry for an elderly woman.