33 karma · joined October 28, 2010
An hour spent hacking to make something useful or cool is never a wasted hour. But wouldn't it suck to realize that you spent years in grad school without even learning anything?
In any case, this sort of news---the rise of cheating---is both good news and bad news for founders. The good is that your competitors are probably hiring these people. Especially so for folks like AirBnB who are competing with hotel chains, etc.
The bad, of course, is that when hiring, you might run into people like this. But if your hiring process>your competitor's process, then this is very much a net gain for you.
Not so much in the business world (and especially tech); while you're busy engaging in a dogfight with Joe Competitor, some third company is kicking your trash by spending money on R&D rather than winning a marketing/feature war. So it generally makes sense to avoid direct confrontation, because it slows you down.
Silver lining to the cloud.
I think the chief reason line length is considered noise rather than signal is because it's so unpredictable. When it's known, people do a great deal to minimize their time spent in line. They go to the store at off hours; they switch lines once they're standing in them. I know my local Taco Bell gets a lot more business from me because of their speedy response time, vs. the teriyaki place next door that I like more, but takes forever. And my college's bookstore has had a great deal of success with putting live camera feeds of their lines (or lack thereof) on their website.
But with grocery stores, I couldn't really tell you which of the two grocery stores in my area would have a longer line. They're about the same, and that's close enough.
So you'd need a pretty big delta for line length to become a differentiating factor between stores. The current system of a cashier scanning items individually probably won't see drastic efficiency improvements without drastic changes, so...drastic changes are needed.
After a certain point, changes in "line length" become "presence or absence of a line at all." As jonnathanson says below, electronic scan-as-you-buy is probably the future there(Smith's, in answer to my cousin's email inquiry, mentioned they were testing a portable bar code scanner). I'm under the impression that grocery stores have pretty cruddy margins, so maybe I shouldn't read that much into "in testing." If anyone out there is dying for a startup idea, I think this one is worth a look. (Before you say it, I'm working on another project, and my cousin left for grad school.)
Since few things are more self-satisfying than sailing out of a store without waiting in line, maybe Whole Foods will be the first? ;)
Anyone else feel like this? I come alive in small groups and one-on-one, but at some threshold (10+ people or so), I feel like there's just too much complexity flying around. Note that I'm pretty sure it's the complexity thing---a group of 300 people all listening to a lecture is easy to deal with, but 40 mixed singles all trying to meet/impress each other seems as complicated as this (http://xkcd.com/173/) would be with 40 people.
Food represents such a small part of the average American's budget (about 12%) that the real restraints on healthy eating are convenience (Chicken sandwich---five minutes of ordering and waiting in line on the way somewhere. Grilled chicken---25 minutes at home) and education (looking up how to make grilled chicken---10 minutes). If anyone actually looks at what they're eating, they can almost certainly increase quality AND decrease cost.