The card already knows the shop.
Nothing does the shopping.
Two million New Zealanders carry a card that records what they buy, when they buy it and what they nearly bought. It earns them points. It does not carry the bags, write the list, or notice that the thing they buy every week is not in the trolley.
This is a concept for joining the two: the loyalty programme you already run, and a personal shopper that acts on what it knows — and stops before it decides anything.
An independent concept. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or commissioned by Woolworths NZ or Everyday Rewards. Every figure on this page carries its source.
Illustrative concept · not a Woolworths product · photo read once, never stored
Six real waits · every spinner is a place to earn · a person signs the send
A wait is the one moment you have someone’s whole attention.
Right now that moment is a spinner, a queue position, or an email saying you will hear back. Tap the phone and watch what goes there instead. It stops to ask you one thing — a real question that holds the line, not a tick box — and then tells you what it learned.
Illustrative concept screen. Not a Woolworths product, no real customer data, and nothing is purchased without review.
The number in the middle is what the person waiting walks away with, and it goes up while they wait. Not a progress bar for the business — a balance for them.
One at a time, each named, each saying what it is doing. Nobody has to take a spinner on trust.
It stops and waits. A question you can scroll past is not a question. Answer it and the screen says what it learned; decline and the basket is still drafted. This is the only part of a customer journey that sends something back the other way.
The reward layer, running for real. Drag to scratch it. Nothing is collected and nothing is sent — it is here so the idea is something you do rather than something you read.
Every wait in a week of groceries.
Six moments a household waits through between the Sunday list and Wednesday dinner — online and in the aisle. Each one is somewhere a card that knows them could be doing something, and currently isn’t.
What this must never do.
Groceries are a weekly, trusted, household purchase. The failure mode is not a bad recommendation — it is a customer who stops believing the app is on their side. So the boundary is written before the feature.
It always
- Prepares, and then stops for the customer to decide
- Says when a placement is funded by a supplier
- Explains why something is on the list — “you buy this most weeks”
- Lets one tap remove anything, permanently, and remembers
- Holds anything reaching a customer for a named person at Woolworths
- Works for a household with no history yet, without pretending to know them
It never
- Adds anything to a trolley on its own
- Completes an order, takes a payment or books a slot
- Puts something in front of someone because a supplier paid the most
- Infers or acts on health, pregnancy, income or religion from a basket
- Uses a child’s presence in the data to sell anything
- Pretends to be a person, or hides that a machine prepared the list
What a pilot actually asks of you.
Written out in full, because the honest version is short and most of it is your time rather than your money.
The approver. Every draft stops with them and nothing reaches a customer until they say so. About two hours a week, reading drafts rather than managing a project.
Six weeks on the online delivery window for a single customer segment. Not the whole loyalty stack, and nothing that touches the trolley.
For tier one: read access to wait events your app already emits and the Everyday Rewards rules you already publish. No customer data leaves your environment and nothing writes to a points balance. Tier two needs no access at all in the pilot — the personalised-shopping layer is designed on paper first, against your rules, before a line of integration is written.
Your brand, legal and retail-media guidelines, so the drafts are held against yours instead of the placeholders on this page. An afternoon with whoever owns them.
Scored on drafts a CX lead ships without rewriting, whether the wait felt shorter to the people in it, and points issued that a named person approved. Fail any line and we change the design or stop.
No number is published on this page because it depends on which wait you pick. Whatever it is, it is agreed before any work starts and it does not move.
Run the pilot.
Say yes to the six weeks above and add anything you would change first. Most pilots move a line or two before they start, and the notes below are how that happens.
Opens your mail app to assembl@assembl.co.nz with your notes in it. Nothing is collected by this page.
- Six weeks, one wait, scored against a written line
- Read-only access, nothing that writes to a balance
- A named approver — nothing sends without them
- A fixed fee, agreed in writing before anything starts
- Stop any time. You keep what was drafted
US retailers lose an estimated $37.7 billion a year to customers who abandon because of long queues, split roughly $15.8b to competitors and $21.9b abandoned outright (Adyen with 451 Research). The New York State Department of Labor reported a 48% reduction in hang-ups after introducing virtual queuing. Theme parks moving to virtual queues reported a 36% lift in per-capita spending, because guests spent the wait somewhere that sold something.
Overseas figures are shown as overseas figures. We have not found a published New Zealand equivalent and we will not invent one.