How many recalls have you seen over the last 2-3 Months involving items such as toys, pet food or canned food?

I receive email alerts daily regarding these things and each time I forward them on to my wife because she is the one that really knows what we’re buying these days. Me, I just see “Elmo”, “Cat Food” or “Green Beans” and think… oh yeah, we have things like this but I’m never sure exactly what we have sometimes when it comes to the finer details.

If you’re not doing the buying and you’re a busy professional then I’m guessing that you probably don’t know either. This is where opportunity lies because if folks are busy guess what, they’re buried in email and so the possibility exists that they’ll miss something critical such as this in their inbox.

My family buys 95% of our groceries from 1 grocery store; Publix in Oldsmar, FL. I wouldn’t think twice about giving my mobile phone number to Publix so that I could opt into an SMS Alert List so that they can reference my historical purchases that might be impacted by an emergency recall. If you’re an SMS Marketing geek see the part about “wouldn’t think twice about opting in”.

This approach would be a superior solution. Today, I receive anywhere from 2-6 recall emails per day from the FDA and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (see www.recalls.gov for others). Do the math, that’s a lot of emails every month. Not that I don’t appreciate the effort but it would be so much more helpful if I could get alerts on my phone from the retailer or manufacturer for products that I purchased. Integration at this level might actually allow the Retailer and Manufacturer to actually tune the alerts right down to the receipt.

Why stop with Grocery stores? As a consumer doesn’t it make sense to be informed of these things immediately? SMS is the flat out fastest mechanism to accomplish this today.� Of course if you’re spooked about privacy this whole idea might not be sounding so good to you which is why it’s “Opt In”.

Does anyone know of any Retailers already doing something like this?

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