Large grocery stores, and especially places like Home Depot, can be intimidating to navigate due to the store’s large inventory, confusing shop layout, and oftentimes unhelpful staff.
This would be a service that would allow users to create and edit, Wiki-style, a visual (top-down) view of not only the store layout, but also where individual items can be found. Coupled with an iPhone-friendly mobile stylesheet so that people can use it while in-store, and maybe even route maps (eg. ”I need to buy eggs, milk, and bananas - what’s the fastest route?”), it could be a huge time-saver for those that are in a hurry (or for those anti-socials amongst us who loathe dealing with store ass-istants).-- slater, Nov 11 2011 (?) Baked http://buildinglayer.com/ [theircompetitor, Nov 11 2011] Nice.
Wondering, would this lead to a constant reshuffling of items by grocery stores in order to keep us guessing and having to resolve the travelling salesman problem?-- RayfordSteele, Nov 11 2011 slater, It is said that supermarkets deliberately rearrange items so that their customers wil have to search for them, and in the process, see a lot of other items they might be tempted to buy. Good idea though.-- Alvin, Nov 11 2011 I'm thinking the key to the main issues would be to make it as easy as possible to edit.
Not sure how often supermarkets rearrange stuff, I think most aisles stay the same, no? EG, milk always seems to be at the back of the store, soda has its own aisle, etc.?-- slater, Nov 11 2011 I don't see why this should have to be crowd-sourced. If the socially timid who wish to quickly locate their chosen comestibles without have to - oh dear god no - actually speak to a human being form a large enough subset of the set "Shoppers", then there may be incentive enough for the store owner to have one of its programming hobgoblins knock something out.-- calum, Nov 11 2011 Brilliant! I would use this in a heartbeat. [+]-- Grogster, Nov 11 2011 But what we're dealing with here is isn't ability to locate goods in a premises (which we can't be because that problem has already been solved by having people you can ask) but is instead how the convenient and extant solution doesn't sit well with (the increasingly prevalent) people-feart geeks, we could have this less pressing problem solved by wrapping tin foil round the arms legs and trunks of staff members and asking them to hold an iPad in camera mode in front of their faces while on the job.-- calum, Nov 11 2011 //Home Depot// There's your problem! We were talking about this just a few days ago. At my local, small hardware shop, run by two brothers who have been there for ages, I can usually walk in with a list of 12 items, and be out the door about 3 minutes later, usually with every single item on the list. At our equivalent of Home Depot you'd still be wandering around in a daze after 20 minutes.-- spidermother, Nov 12 2011 random, halfbakery