While I still don’t have an iPhone ( I love Verizon and its customer service), I am excited about all the apps out there. They are changing the way we do business, run our ives, even shop. The Apple app store has applications for their iPhones in numbers that stagger the imagination. Lost? Use the iPhone to give you directions. Wonder what that song is you are hearing? Let the iPhone tell you. What star is that in the sky? Take a picture and the iPhone will tell you. Yes there is an application for nearly anything under the sun, and while many are frivolous and silly, many are going to have a huge impact on how we look at things like paper printing and credit cards. It does take electricity to keep your iPhone powered up, but the reduction in paper could make a huge impact.
A while back, TSA started a pilot program to allow some customers to download their boarding pass directly to their smart phone, where it could be scanned for boarding. If you think about the sheer volume of people flying into and out of a major airport, we could same tons of paper every day with a program like this. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport had over 90 million passengers last year. That is 90 million sheets of paper that could have been saved. By my unscientific calculations, that is a stack about the size of a 10 story building every day, or 35 stacks a year the size of the Eiffel Tower. That is just one airport, granted the busiest airport in the world (rated by the Airports Council International), but still only one airport.
I have heard that JC Penney was experimenting with coupons for smart-phones and iPhones. This is a program that I can get behind. We have undergone a huge paper reduction and managed to get our junk mail reduced significantly. Still, we receive a pretty hefty chunk of coupons in the mail. Then there is the newspaper, which is dying a slow painful death these days. With sales and coupons available online, consumers no longer need to deal with the stack of print that we used to. If one could opt-in to recieve ads and coupons directly to your phone from all your favorite stores, then shopping would become a breeze. No more HH Greg coupons if you don’t buy appliances or electronics, or no more clothing ads if you are thrift store shopper. Not only could this make a huge dent in the amount of paper we waste every year, but it could go a long way to making stores more profitable. They can market to the customers who want their merchandise and not the whole world. One day, it could mean the end of the printed circular.
There are two apps for the iPhone that make shopping easier now. Wallet Zero and CardStar allow users to imput their store loyalty cards into their iPhone and it creates the barcode that can be scanned at the store. I don’t know about you, but between Best Buy, Giant Eagle, CVS, Pat Catans, Staples, and a host of other stores, my wallet can be bulging. I tried using the keyring bits, but they all come off and the bar code becomes obscured. Now with the right app, one can eliminate all of that. Good news, too, as those highly laminated cards do not recycle.
Traveling? Forget about printing maps anymore. With an app from the Apple Store, you can have virtually any map on your phone in seconds. No more need for printing postcards or stamps. When you are out and about, you can make your own with a photo that you snap with your phone and email instantly. With phrase books on your phone, you can get everything that you want while you are away. For that matter, you can buy whole books and read them on the go, what a convenience.
Another cool app is changing the way we do business. Ever wanted to pay with a credit card while at an art fair or other outdoor performance. Now there is an app that lets a merchant run a credit card through their phone, capture a signature and emails a receipt. No fuss, no muss. Many thermal receipt printers use paper that is not recyclable, and they fade rather quickly. Have an electronic receipt would make my life so much easier to manage.
While there are greener phones out there, like Samsung’s phone with 80% recycled materials, the iPhone could help the whole world jump start their green efforts. A simple reduction of paper, means less trees destroyed, less emissions from mills, and less waste. When you think about the fact that most landfills are approximately 36% paper filled, we could do a lot for the planet by simply reducing our paper usage. For every ton of paper that is not thrown out, we save 3 cubic yards of landfill. So, saving the planet, there ARE apps for that!
I like the ideas behind all this, but it only amplifies the problems I have with cell phones. If everyone has one and is using it all the time for items like this, you are expected to be available all the time. When I carried a cell phone full time people would get upset at me if I didn’t answer the phone “what’s the point of having a cell phone if you don’t answer it?”
Too many people are available too often now. There is no such thing as escaping anymore, and it drives me crazy. Boss calls on your day off and gets upset because you didn’t answer…isn’t that the point of a day off? Client calls at 8pm because they had an idea about a change to their plan that could have waited until the morning and gets upset because they couldn’t talk to you?
The list goes on, and until people change their attitudes I’ll be skipping out on the whole cell phone craze. lol.
One thing that has changed these days is the way we interact. We have what some of us consider to be too much information available at all times. Kids are texting and skyping everything and in touch with the internet in ways that our generation could never have imagined. Sometimes I do long for the simpler times when people walked and went outside, when there were fewer choices and reading was necessary, not a weird old fashioned pastime. It is a crazy world we live in!