ideas, part 2

2. coupons
When my family first came to the states in '92, a family of 3 had to live on a $25k/yr budget. Back then, we did everything to stretch our budget, from coupon cutting to driving to mexican shopping mall at downtown SD for groceries. Of course back then, gas was around $1.25/ga, so it wasn't as painful to make that drive.

As time progressed and as our income went up, the art of coupon cutting slowly went away. These days, it's just a lot more time saving and a lot more convenient to go to Costco for none-grocery item, and 99-ranch or korean market for everything else. As for electronics, there are always online stores that are far cheaper than anything Best Buy or Fry's offer even when it's on sale (amazon, ebay, woot, whatever). And of course there are websites like slickdeals.net to help find good deals easier.

Nevertheless, as the economy is getting worse and everyone's belt is getting tighter, there isn't yet a good way to maximize daily expenses like groceries. I remember there used to be a time when you can ring up like 25 items for $75, apply coupon and sometime double-coupon, and end up paying $10 for them. Yes, those days still exist now, as highlighted by a recent NPR segment. Unfortunately, the art of going through weekly grocery ads and coupons, is mostly a lost art for most Americans, as is the newspaper business and along with it, the Sunday Coupons...

So, I figured, while it's not the world's easiest thing to do, it wouldn't be the most difficult either, to match ads with coupons in order to maximize every dollar you earn. Start with digital or a scanned version of local weekly ads that comes in the mail every tue/wed, along with advertisements inside the newspaper, plus coupons found on Sunday's paper or through the mail (let's face it, who religiously go through "penny saver" these days? -_-') and match them.

The hard part is proper recognition of ads and coupons, as they are often arranged in ways that are not the easiest to partition, OCR, and categorize. Once that part is taken care of, next is properly addressing expiration date of coupons. Next, having a mock shopping-cart could be useful, where the user can estimate how much things cost for them to only go to local ralphs or vons, vs. going to multiple places. Email alerts on prices would be helpful too, like say if someone wants to wait around for toothpaste to become free after coupon... Lastly, having a list of none-on-sale items at the local grocery store will complete the online grocery shopping experience. After-all, $4/lb of orange "on sale" at Ralphs is still far more expensive than $1/lb of similar stuff at 99-ranch. (Green onions are like $.40 at Food4Less, $.33 at 99-ranch, $.25 at local Korean market, lol)

This of course, would provide tremendous price-pressure on local grocery stores. But then again, Super-Walmart already did that for 80% of the country. Only in areas where it's banned by law (*ahm*city of san diego*ahm*) are grocery stores still able to charge so much. Granted they have better pay and benefits than a Walmart, but sometimes, their prices are just ridiculous... If Trader Joes can provide organic products for comparable if not cheaper prices than local grocery stores, while providing good wages and benefits, Vons and Ralphs can reduce their prices by becoming more operationally efficient!

3. cart return
Grocery carts are expensive (~$200 each), require some poor joe to collect and drag it back to the store, and gets left everywhere, especially near tree-planting areas and such. There's also the issue of "dude, where's my car?" where people forget where they park at big parking lots like those in front of Costco. So, it would be far easier if there's a dedicated cart to each parking spot, on a rail-track system, that starts and ends at the entrance/exit of the stores. When someone parks, their cart will follow them to the door of the store. When they exit, their cart will lead them back to their car.

Conceptually simple, logistically not the simplest thing to do. For starters, there's the cart-congestion issue... which I guess we can address by having a "driving lane" and a "parking lane" for carts. 4 lanes for carts is enough to park a car, which means even less parking spots... that's not ideal... So perhaps a cart-distribution location, like the current setup where 25-50 carts fit in 1 parking spot would be more preferred. Once the person park their car, the parking spot has a number in front and a sensor below. A cart will light up with the associated parking spot number and make its way to the store. On the way out, it finds its way to the back of the car where the trunk is located, then return to the nearest distribution location.

Then there's the liability issue... what if someone's walking along the track and get hit by a cart, who'll be responsible? I guess there has to be some kind of proximity sensor and warning/alarm system... or you just have to build the whole thing above/below ground to avoid people and reduce space usage all-together. Of course this makes the already expensive idea even more expensive, and any failures much more difficult to correct... Oh the tradeoffs -_-