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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I've wanted a system for a while where shops can provide a map, and I can search for an item and it will show me where in the shop that item is. I don't think I've ever been in a shop big enough where I'd need satnav to tell me how to get there though, is that an American thing?

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Tesco in the UK literally has this but only for staff. If you work for Tesco you can access any shop, view a map, view where stock is on a shelf, check stock numbers and expected delivery and all that stuff.

Things that would absolutely be an amazing QOL improvement for any shopper. But they won't let you have it because they WANT you to bumble your way around a shop. They don't want you to know where things are. That's why they move shelves around seemingly at random.

I was going to shout out Tesco specifically, for a similar feature they have on their website/app in Ireland/UK.

If you find a product's page, there's an "other items on this shelf" section which shows items that are located next to it. It's probably not intended to help you locate things, but it's incredibly helpful for it.

Adds way more things for you to notice and tell you're in the right location. Same haystack, more needles.

I actually find this feature of supermarkets quite useful. Online shopping is far less discoverable - the end result is I forget things from my online shop quite often.

I find exceptionally annoying when I don't know if I need to look for my preferred moisturizer in "skincare" or "premium skincare" or some other section I've not seen yet (yes this is a common issue for me). If I could just load up their (horribly slow and memory heavy) website, go to the store locator and actually see where it is in the shop instead of "yeah we have it in stock, somewhere", that would be very useful

For me the end result is I buy random crap from the shop that I don't need. Sometimes it's good because it's new and I wanna try it, but sometimes it's just me being a pig.

I don't forget anything because I have a list.

Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards, and Wal-Mart are examples off the top of my head that have this product locator functionality on their websites.

I used this at Menards two days ago. The product location told me where the item was. Turned out that aisle g94 wasn’t aisle 94 but a kiosk at the end of aisle 27 on the other side of the store (these numbers are made up I don’t recall the specifics). I still had to ask a human where it was. So yeah not there yet and this type of service could really help.

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