I was out and about this weekend when Mrs H called me to ask me to buy something for her. She said she’d already asked our brother-in-law to buy it, but the shop he was in at the time was out of stock.

I was near a large Tesco supermarket so I drove there and went inside. Unfortunately they had sold out as well. I had visions of driving around endlessly, so while I was in Tesco I looked up the product on Argos’s website.

There was one remaining from a branch five minutes away. I clicked the reserve & buy button and received a confirmation text message that as long as I went to the Argos shop in the next 48 hours, the product was mine.

My afternoon was saved.

And it seems my use case is not uncommon. This is [the excellent] Erik Qualman’s latest video Mobilenomics.