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Comment by aiurtourist | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to sound cynical, but are you sure this is a problem worth solving?

Yes, it's a problem, but it's along the lines of my microwave getting dirty over time, or needing to fill a car tire occasionally. I don't need or care about a service that only cleans microwaves or only fills tires.

If you want to improve on brick-and-morter, feet-in-the-store retail problems, why not, say, show me a big pinterest-style list of everything in every grocery store around me? That would save me some time instead of perusing up and down aisles and not being sure whether I should visit that farmer's market that sometimes has interesting stuff.

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You make a good point, and candidly, we're not sure. The crux of the problem as we see it is that:

- If you enjoy shopping, you're probably pretty good at it, and don't need a lot of hand-holding.

- If you don't enjoy shopping, then a store is a bad solution. A better solution is "don't go to the store at all, we'll ship you the stuff," aka Amazon

What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this? i.e. Willing to go shopping, if stores can just make it bit easier when you get there.

Thoughts?

> What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this?

Yes. Go do that. Like, right now. Find people you don't know who you think are your target demographic and ask them. They're probably in the grocery store right now.

You'll come back thinking (A) that nobody really this problem, (B) that everybody has this problem, or that (C) nobody thinks they have this problem and you need to show them that it is a problem and that, once you do, you'll change their life forever. B is probably a little delusional. C sounds really time-consuming and expensive.

Yeah. Thanks for that. We've done some of this and we're seeing (a) or (c).

We've kept going because we "feel" that there's something to be "fixed" inside a store.

For example, discovering new products inside a store is really painful. Typical "big box" stores are >100,000 sq ft with >100,000 products.

Want to find a "healthy snack that taste like wheat thins and goes well with cheese"? Well, we have a wall of a 1,000 products. What you're looking for might be in there somewhere.

What do you think of this related problem?

I'm no expert, but I'm very sure that the difficulty in finding items in a retail store is by design.

If every customer walked in, grabbed exactly what they needed without looking at anything else, paid and left, the stores would probably make half as much money. It's common knowledge that "big brand" items in a grocery store go on the eye-level shelves because the distributors have paid more, and I remember reading that the ends of the aisles ("caps" maybe?) are super-primo real estate - that's why the ends always have Pepsi and Tostitos and big-name items. It's probably the same reason there are "impulse items" in the aisle when you check out. Oh, hey, yeah, I do need some gum, why not buy a pack.

Yeah -- It's definitely by design.

It's also by design that milk and bread are in the back corners of the store.

But, ecommerce makes this disdain for the shopper unsustainable. 10 years ago, if you're store sucks, you don't really have a choice. Now, if you're store sucks ... well I can buy a majority of the stuff I need through Amazon, Diapers.com, etc.

So, could HelpPing be a timing play? Helping change stores right when they need to change ... so that they can survive to 2020?

This sounds too theoretical even as I type it

I don't think the grocery store will change anytime soon. :)

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