On one hand it’s surprising, on the other one understandable. Considering the convenience of buying from home with discounts of sometimes up to 75%, the idea doesn’t seem so bad. Francisco Victorero, trade manager of the digital area of Paris, said in an interview with the Chilean newspaper Emol that e-commerce grows rapidly worldwide thanks to its convenience and easiness, which allows the customers to save time on their shopping.

In Chile also some supermarkets sell online, which makes the weekly grocery shopping extremely more comfortable.

Although it’s more comfortable and many times more economic than buying in the store, I still haven’t changed my “old school” style, which allows me to get some air, walk a bit, look for new and interesting products at the supermarket and make some REAL social contact, which in today’s world is more and more missing.

chile earthquake

Each of us have our media sources that we trust for information about certain topics.  In the U.S. and in many cases internationally, a few names come to mind such as ESPN for sports, TMZ for celebrity gossip, CNN for news, and the Wall Street Journal for business information.

With the earthquake in Chile- a country I lived in for four years- my first choice was to forgo the hours of analysis on CNN regarding the potential impact of the resulting 2-foot waves produced by the tsunami to find information directly from news sources in Chile.  Not so surprisingly, I found the largest Chilean newspaper El Mercurio’s website EMOL was down.   While I am not exactly sure which of the many legitimate causes (traffic, power outages, damage) were responsible, this highlights the challenges of finding reliable information from your country of origin or a country that you care about.

Outside of major occurrences, usually catastrophic or war-related, there is limited information available without accessing the country’s media publication.  For those who speak the language of the country this is not a major problem in the digital age; however for others,  blogs, Twitter, and Facebook have become a source of information.  While very useful, I for one rely on and hope to continue to rely on the journalists that make up local news sources from every city or country.