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Comment by bmmayer1 | Hacker News Reader

Mel Brooks joke: a man in a deli notices that there's nothing but salt on every shelf. He asks the shopkeeper if he sells a lot of salt. The shopkeeper says "If I sell a bag of salt a week I'm lucky. But the guy who sells me salt, boy, can he sell salt!"

This is a great idea that "doesn't scale" and could one day be a $1B business. Well done!

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Sorry but, I don't get the analogy, could you elaborate?

He sucks at selling, however the guy who he buys the salt from is excellent at selling. Therefore capable of getting the shop owner to buy excessive amounts of salt.

Go on ... How does this relate to websites for half loaves of bread?

Because big business is great at selling us more than we really need (can consume). We are buying full loaves and rarely using them up. This is likely by design too... Margins are probably higher for the seller this way. So the website helps you pass off your excess.

We put the bar a lot lower on half loaf of bread news than we do for nuclear fusion news.

I have no idea... I am just answering the question.

I don't really understand how this could ever be a $1b business, or how that relates to the salt joke.

Could be...think about this: a niche search engine that tells you which individual products are in stock, and where they are, could be very valuable indeed. How many times have you thought, "I need to buy an X right now, but I don't know which store(s) carry it?"

but similar sites already exist, and 99% of the time this question can be answered by putting the product X into google with your city name/country name if you're willing to have it shipped.

It could become some niche search engine but I don't see any money at all involved. Nobody is earning commission on half a loaf of bread. There's no money there. There are already store stock tracking websites for many profitable products (like photography equipment) and general search. The half a loaf of bread niche is a guarantee that there's no money in this particular site.

For in person shopping I don't believe this exists. But look I said it "could" be a $billion company. This sort of project looks a lot like early versions of what eventually become $BBB companies. No one can predict the future.

as long as you can scrape their stock from the website, it exists. If you can't, then this site can't solve it.

For example, I look for photography equipment prices (in canada) using photoprice.ca, which scrapes canadian camera stores that have their stock online like henry's or broadway camera, as well as comparing against amazon.ca, amazon.com, and US stores that ship to canada like Adorama and B&H.

The issue is just 'is the data available'. None of that makes it profitable if it's just loaves of bread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

for every unicorn, a hundred thousand failed businesses you never heard of, including half a loaf search engines.

I see a new dating app in the making ... match people who want half loaves with others who want half loaves and send them out to buy a full loaf together.

There are two halves to every half loaf, as well as the various quantities in beween. Matching karen who has eaten the first half, with Darren who has 9 (of the original 29 slices) left with BillyJoeJimBob who has eaten 'every other slice' sounds ike a nightmare....but so much like real loaf....i mean life.

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