About two months ago, I saw my first tablet shopper in the wild. I really wanted to take a picture of this individual, but I restrained myself. He was in a grocery store, and he had his iPad propped up in the child seat of his grocery cart. He was doing the “grocery shuffle” – hunched over so most of his weight was resting on the cart handles, and walking very slowly (right down the middle of the aisle, of course). As far as I could tell, he was checking off items on his grocery list as he shopped – it definitely wasn’t Angry Birds or Candy Crush on his screen. Maybe he could’ve been checking email.

At the time I thought (annoyed, as I passed his lane-hogging cart by) that I could never see a need to take my iPad with me to shop. I was wrong. Here’s why.

Retailers who complain about showrooming – here defined as the act of visiting a store with the express purpose of examining the item to be purchased before ultimately buying it online – have for a time now been complaining about it as if this behavior is new. In reality, maybe the ultimate channel of purchase is new, but the act of showrooming has been happening for decades. Technology has simply compressed the timeline in which the behavior occurs.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, you would showroom by driving to a retailer, checking out the selection and the prices, then getting back into your car and driving to the next competitive retailer down the road to check their selection and prices. It was still showrooming. It just took longer, so required a bit more determination on the part of the consumer to pull it off.

Today, it’s true that the level of determination required to showroom is a much lower level than it was fifteen years go – and thus, more accessible even to people who might not have historically undertaken showrooming behavior. Technology has in effect short-circuited the showrooming process.

Showrooming behavior isn’t the only shopping process that is getting short-circuited by technology. In fact, I would argue that almost every shopping behavior is impacted. We’ve seen it most significantly when it comes to research – that activity has almost entirely moved online these days. And we’ve seen technology’s impact on brand, too. It used to be that consumers made their decision on where to shop primarily based on the retailer’s brand promise. If you weren’t a showrooming type of customer, you picked the retailer you trusted most, went there first, and bought whatever they had to sell you. Only if that retailer completely disappointed you would you consider going elsewhere, and only if they disappointed you time and time again would you consider switching retailers permanently.

But now I find that the disruption doesn’t end there. My family is in the midst of a kitchen remodel. As part of the remodel, we’re getting new appliances. Funny thing, though. We definitely wanted to see all of the items that we were purchasing – particularly the range and the refrigerator. We wanted to make sure the double oven would really fit the kind of food we want to cook. And we wanted to pull on the handles and slide the drawers around and look at the ice machine in the refrigerator. But it required traveling to three different retailers to see all of the options we wanted to look at: Home Depot, Sears, and Best Buy.

And that was the first time I found myself wishing I’d brought my iPad with me. Because looking at the LG refrigerator from Home Depot on my phone while standing in front of the Kenmore refrigerator at Sears was not an ideal experience for making product comparisons. There just wasn’t enough real estate on my phone screen. And the multi-store comparison was necessary because none of the retailers stocked representative examples of all of the options. Interestingly, there was very little overlap between the three retailers in the floor models they did stock. A strategy? Hmmm.

My point is this: I don’t think we’re done seeing a shift in shopping behaviors. And for my own personal experience, a path to purchase that normally would’ve taken a couple of weeks was collapsed down to one weekend because of a mobile phone, and it probably would’ve been collapsed down to one afternoon if we’d brought the iPad with us. Granted, appliances are practically the definition of “high consideration” item – they’re expensive, and they are the kind of purchase that is made infrequently. But I’ve also found that what starts out as a high consideration item behavior rapidly becomes something accessible to much lower consideration items. The trend is two-fold: disrupting the pattern of online to store to purchase, and collapsing it into something that happens much more quickly.