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Comment by the_watcher | Hacker News Reader

When I'm in the grocery store, looking for an obscure item (cheese cloth is the one that made me think of this). Build me a mobile app to search and get info on where in the store the item is.

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It is, of course, to the advantage of the store that you don't go directly to the one item you want. A lot of research goes into how customers wander through stores, and how to sell to them in that time.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5702...

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1293.pdf

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/advice/19990402c.asp

This is a particularly difficult problem, one that I actually happen to be involved with at the moment.

The short answer is that crowdsourcing is thus far ineffective, as there is as yet no suitable reward for tracking down where every single obscure product is in each store (and it will vary from store to store, even within the same chains). This means it's up to each individual chain to create their own item locator system.

Walmart is currently working on this.

Curious: are you involved with Walmart in the creation of the problem?

If so, are you guys using that RFID system that was being used for keeping tabs on stock levels at all times?

I'm in the department that handles the layout of the store's major hardware fixtures. Not quite merchandise-level, but some of our projects overlap projects that deal with this from time to time.

I know we've researched the RFID solution extensively, and last I heard it would require installation of high-powered RFID readers throughout all the stores, as well as buy-in from all our suppliers to include RFID in their product packaging, so it wasn't quite viable.

I think currently the plan is to "number" all the aisles (departments other than grocery get letter-number labels) and then have the store employees scan in all the items for each aisle. Last time I was in Store 100 in Bentonville they seemed to be piloting that.

How about asking one of the store employees lurking about?

(Your idea is indeed pretty cool. It would be nice if your smartphone walked you up to the item you are looking for. But I don't see a positive cost/benefit factor. It will be needed only on rare occasions.)

I can see this being useful in large libraries too.

Some of the positive cost/benefit factors will arise as a result of the data necessary to create such a system.

By knowing where every single item is in a store, you can create efficient routes through that store to make your shopping trip only as long as is necessary.

Also, in some big-box stores an employee may not be familiar with items outside of their assigned area. They may only be able to direct you to the general vicinity, or have to call in some additional help.

Solving a problem is often about finding the right approach / fudging the problem into something you can solve. And there is actually a disruptive solution to this: online shopping. Amazon has cheese cloth.

But they won't deliver it before dinner today.

The problem is that it was a spur of the moment decision to try to make ricotta, needed it then and there. Amazon solves this if you regularly need cheese cloth, but not if you have never heard of it and all of sudden find out you need it that night.

This is a problem we've assessed a bit at http://foodtree.com - there are some efforts in this space but none seem to have the penetration to make it useful at scale. Our approach is to help grocers "spread their great story" as an incentive to start mapping their inventory, both in the "where it's from/who made it and how" perspective and the "what store near me has OBSCUREITEM available right now" perspective, which is your problem but only to store level. Getting to that level right now is tough with food retail chains, but they're moving in the right direction.

So that we don't have to wait for them, we're trying to enable crowd-sourcing as well; "I saw OBSCUREITEM here in case you're looking for it in town".

Again, very aware this is only your problem at the store's front door, but maybe it's nice to know someone's working on it? :)

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