January 15, 2010

• on grocery stores and aluminum foil and writing just to write

  I haven’t felt much up to writing lately for reasons I do not know. Writing lacks its appeal and inspiration seems hard to find. It’s probably connected to general sense of disjointedness I’ve felt with the world in general and with it an attendant desire not to communicate very much. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had plenty of thoughts to write about. I have. In fact I’ve been drowning in thoughts. The more quiet I make myself the more fluid my thinking. It’s a near endless supply of random thoughts from the very strange to the very interesting floating before my mind. But I’ve felt no desire to share. Sharing seemed so pointless. I was waiting as I so often do to feel as if there was something that I wanted to write that mattered.

  Perhaps in part the latest disinclination to write has been because I’ve been sick. For the past week I’ve been hacking and coughing and it’s hard to write when it feels like your brain is shutting down at 8 o’clock at night and all you want to do is sleep. But I haven’t written anything substatnial for weeks prior to that so it’s probably a lot more to do with my growing mental lethargy and sense of dissatisfaction with my writing.

  I’ve always thought the only real sure fire cure to writer’s block is to write. Inspiration may not come immediately but it surely reduces the probability of inspiration if you never set finger to keyboard or pen to paper. Some ideas that you dismiss within your own mind can become something greater than you imagined it could be if you just take the time to write it out and see what can become of it.

  But I’ve always sucked at following my own advice in the past and likely will in the future. But at least for today let me at least try to simply write some of those random thoughts out if only to see what happens.

  Consider aluminum.

  The other day I bought aluminum foil at a super market. And the foil I bought sucked. This was like, the worst aluminum foil imaginable. The foil just falls apart at the slightest touch. It was extremely cheap and that’s why I bought it but I didn’t expect the quality of aluminum foil to differ THAT vastly between different brands.

  Now people just say “serves you right for trying to buy cheap stuff!” and “you should know better that you can’t get something for nothing!” And so on.

  Others would argue that no problem occurred here. They’d say I got a short term advantage (lower cost) through a long term risk. So then when the aluminum foil falls apart when I need it, oh well that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Or rather, how the foil crumbles. I should just make the best use of the foil I can and next time gauge whether or not that short term gain is worth the long term risk.

  But I have a different take on this. It sort of reveals an inherent flaw in the theory of efficient markets. I always thought that in an efficient market rational selfish investors make informed decisions about what products to buy and at what price. And that information in total ultimately sets the price of the goods. Goods that nobody rational would buy at any price don’t get produced.

  The problem with that equation is the idea that we are informed.  I was not an informed customer. Had I been I would never have bought that cheapass foil. Indeed I suspect that cheapass foil would never be bought except in the most extreme situations and would probably not be economical to produce if everyone knew how pathetically ineffectual it really was. But people don’t know. They’re uninformed.

  While I stood there in the super market I had no way to know the aluminum foil I was about to buy was not effective for my purposes. There was no information on the package that could allow me to make that determination fairly.  I usually buy things based on something like price per square foot or price per unit. However that’s a trivially tiny amount of information about a product. There’s a LOT more to it even in judging something so simple as aluminum foil.

  If I had tried to make an informed rational decision about aluminum foil I would need a lot more information. Now you could say I could use the weight of the package or the thickness of the foil as a way to judge, so a quick fix would be to print those on the package so I can examine price per weight, price per square foot, and price per thickness. The weight WAS on the package so maybe I was an idiot to not take that into account in the first place.

  However, in reality weight and thickness are really bad ways to judge foil. They’re only proxies for the real information we want and not very good proxies at that. We can imagine someone engineering a super thin, super light weight aluminum foil that’s just really good and doesn’t fall apart and even finding a way to create it a very low cost. That would just be better aluminum foil. But if consumers were to be judging foil on a price per weight or a price per thickness scale, companies would have an incentive to continue to make their aluminum foil thick and heavy, even when technological advances allow them to make better aluminum foil.

  No, what I really need is something a lot more technical. I need to know how much force it takes to pull apart a piece of aluminum foil when pulled on the sides. I need that number to be high. I also need to know how much force it takes to push/poke a hole in the foil when fully outstretched. That number I also want to be high. But at the same time in order for the foil to have high utility it still has to be easy to tear, so the force required to rip the foil needs to be low. I need to know that too.

  I also might want to know how much the foil conducts heat. And how likely things are to stick to the aluminum foil. I have no idea how you even measure that. I might care about how compact I can make the foil when crinkling it or how easily I can unfold a pre-crinkled sheet to reuse it. There could be tons of other pieces of information I’ve never even thought of that might influence my decision on what brand of aluminum foil to use.

  The fact is, I’m NOT a materials science expert. I have no knowledge of how to even effectively test that one brand of aluminum foil is really better than another. So how exactly can I be an informed consumer of aluminum foil? Really I can only guess. Other than that the only way to know is to use an experimental approach. I have to like try all kinds of different aluminum foils and decide which one is the best value for the price for my usage patterns.  But then what if the prices change? What if the manufacturing methods change for specific brands?  Suddenly I have to re-evaluate all the foils again to pick one that works? How much wasted money am I putting into substandard brands of aluminum foil during these testing phases simply because I am not a sufficiently informed consumer? It’s not like I can just get a small amount to test too. I have to buy a whole box of the crap because that’s all it’s sold in. And then I am un-inclined to buy a new box until I use up the first box. Given that, and given that new brands might be invented every couple of years, it’s not inconceivable that I could be buying aluminum foil my entire life before I determine which brand is the best cost for quality rating for my purposes.

  It gets even worse than that. I also don’t know what characteristics of aluminum foil serve better for different use patterns. What if some form of aluminum foil is better for cooking frozen pizza on and another is better for wrapping foods that you intend to freeze or for covering a food that is cooking in the oven or on the grill?  And then you have to compare your usage patterns to effectiveness with other non-aluminum foil products. Would I get better bang for my buck by using a pan or by covering food with saran wrap or zip lock bags? Not only am I not a materials science expert, but I’m also not a cook and indeed I have little to no experience managing a kitchen. So it’s not like I have a lot of experience to back me up in making these choices. Here I don’t even know what characteristics I OUGHT to care about when deciding what foil to buy. Does reflexiveness matter for that? Do I need to know how well the foil conducts heat? How good it is at resisting things getting stuck to it? I have no idea what to look for or how to measure it.

  And none of that even takes into account knowledge of the companies and their manufacturing processes themselves. It might be that a particular brand of aluminum foil is perfect for all my purposes and cheap but because the company has engaged in immoral illegal and terrible acts abroad I don’t want to give them my business. A company might be lobbying congress to prevent reforms that are important to me, so I might want to exclude them from consideration. Heck I might want to well rate all aluminum foil manufacturers by how well they treat their employees or how good they are with charity works and how environmentally friendly the production of their product is and put higher consideration to the companies that score best. But I’m not an expert on international affairs or business or the environment either nor am I aware of all the news stories about companies that come out. Often even when I KNOW a company has done wrong I don’t know that some particular product is made by a particular company. So I might mess up and support them anyway.

  I have to conclude from this experience with this utterly simple totally uninteresting product that the very idea of an informed consumer is a MYTH. Such creatures do not exist in the real world. We don’t even have anything that remotely resembles them. We only have guessers and mystics who divine our product choices on commercials, on images and packaging, on brand names and labels, and profits who tell us what companies are good and bad, and most of all on price.  The price is considered the mystical substitute for all kinds of other pieces of information. We assume just as a general matter of course that things that are more expensive are inherently better than things that are cheap. That’s why people say things like you can’t get anything for free and call you a cheapskate if you buy the cheapest brand. But that understanding creates all kinds of weird incentives. Companies then have an incentive to price UP their products in order to give the appearance of their product being better than another. 

  Now obviously a company couldn’t get away with waay over pricing a product (unless they are catering to those amongst the rich who care ONLY about the price and how that proxies for a status symbol). Normal people would eventually realize it’s crap and not buy it. But if there’s an acceptable range of prices based on the cost of production, the price the company will choose will be near the highest in the acceptable range. That will cause more people who care about quality to buy the product. Of course there are other consumers that will throw up their hands at the quality and just buy the very cheapest goods. Those companies that cater to those consumers will just produce crap so that they can push the price down as low as possible.  Hence, when I was in the market there was the crap foil that I got and then a big gap in cost and then the substantially more expensive better quality brands.

  So markets strike me as terrible mechanisms for pricing goods. They simply fail to create prices that reflect the real values of goods. That doesn’t even take into account the big external costs problem that markets suffer that you learn in every good economics class.

  And I have no idea what to do about these problems. Regulation strikes me as a clunky cure. Companies just look for ways around them for one and the very act of looking for loopholes or manipulating the regulation becomes a lucrative business. And for another, what characteristics matter changes over time. And those changes occur much more rapidly than changes in regulation at least in any and all regulatory models we’ve ever invented.

  Information technology helps somewhat in making us more informed but it fails compared to the scope of the problem. In order for it to work every single purchase you make has to be a serious research project and nobody has the time or the energy to do that. Reviews have sort of become the defacto “solution” people use. Trying to learn more information from other people’s experiences. That’s only become even really possible with the advent of computers and the internet. In the past you cold maybe learn from the experiences of your neighbors and friends but that was a tiny sample size and would include all kinds of inefficient biases making the information untrustworthy.

  But with the internet, reviews are probably the most effective solution we have, especially when we get very large sample sizes. But of course companies manipulate and influence reviews in rather seedy ways, either creating fake reviews or deleting bad ones if they have control over the medium. And if there aren’t a lot of reviews you really can’t rely on the evidence you get at all. That would be the same as basing your decision on anecdotal evidence. So basically initial buyers are out of luck. They’re just guinea pigs to help other people make better decisions. And in such a world that creates an incentive for all companies to try and sell as much as they can immediately. Before the possibly negative reviews come in which might kill their sales. So that would encourage spending more money on shallow marketing ploys and constantly creating new generations of products whether there is new technology to support it or not.

  Still, I think a vibrant democratic open public review and commentary process is essential for markets to function even a little bit.

  If someone has better solutions I’d love to hear them.

  BTW Sometimes I hear people argue that for things like financial systems something like that the only problems which resulted in the financial crises were government interference. They argue that the major investment organizations NEVER made any mistakes and did nothing wrong. The argument goes that they had to know what they were buying and they had to be making rational choices and the market had to be efficient because markets ARE inherently efficient. To explain the downturn they then complain that it was just a normal cyclical unexplainable recession caused by god only knows what and now all this government intervention is just making everything worse. If the government had simply done NOTHING everything would be FINE!

  The people who argue this tend to invariably be from Chicago or they tend to have learned their economics from someone from Chicago.

  I have several problems with this theory. First and foremost, it’s entirely possible that bankers DID know what they were doing and KNEW that their actions would cause an economic collapse. They have very little incentive to prevent an economic collapse if they are getting all their personal money up front. If there is an inherent disconnect between the fate of the companies they run and the fate of the executives running the company there’s no reason to suspect the executives to care about the long term future of their companies.

  But I think there’s an even deeper problem and at its heart lies this idea of aluminum foil. What on EARTH makes us so convinced that the people working at these big major investment institutions were sooo very incredibly knowledgible that they knew what they were doing? Why do we think they were all well informed and knew all of the costs and consequences of buying these financial instruments? It’s entirely possible they DIDN’T know very much.  They could easily have been GUESSING. Just like me buying el cheapo aluminum foil guessing that it might work just as good as other foil.   HAD the foil worked as good as the others for my purposes I would have had a huge pragmatic return on investment. Maybe that’s what these bankers thought too.  They thought they were buying good products but the products were so complex they didn’t even understand them. So in reality they were buying crappy products that when they went to use them turned out to be crap.

  Another word for GUESSING like this is GAMBLING. The Bankers were rolling the dice on very low odds. That should have been prohibitively expensive to do because of the extreme risk. If markets were working that’d be the case. But people weren’t informed as to the risk. They didn’t know. They weren’t informed consumers. Because such entities don’t exist. And maybe those who did know were silent because they wanted to cash in on everyone else’s misfortune.

  Of course I’m not saying government didn’t make mistakes afterward. Oh that part the Chicagoans have somewhat right. Certainly the perverse incentives reflected in “too big to fail” are horribly dangerous for our economy’s long term future.  But my point here is only this. I become highly skeptical of markets. Certainly the godlike magical view of markets seems entirely divorced from reality. Such do I learn every time I go to the supermarket.

  OK moving on. Still at the supermarket. Let’s talk about another one of my pet peeves. Missing price tags.

  Now I just went on that long screed about how little information we actually have when trying to make an informed decision when buying even half way useless crap that probably ought not be being bought at all like aluminum foil (seriously the damage to the environment in its production probably ought to make its cost way exorbitant if priced in). And if you were paying attention I said that one of the only forms of information we use because it’s one of the best pieces of information available to us at the time of purchase is the PRICE.

  So ohh how I get ENRAGED when even THAT piece of information is denied me!!

  I’ve never worked in a super market or any kind of convenience store or drug store. I’ve never had the I’m sure incredibly joyful experience of having to put up price tags for every single solitary product on your shelves. I’m sure it’s very easy for mistakes to be made. I’m sure often tags aren’t printed out properly or goods are ordered that aren’t on the list or tags get torn off by customers, stolen, accidentally dropped, and all kinds of other things can go wrong causing a price tag to not be available while buying goods at the supermarket.

  And that’s totally understandable. If it happened every once in a while, well fine. Normal cost of doing business. I can just ask for the price though it pains and annoys me to do this.

  BUT THIS HAPPENS TO ME ALL THE TIME!! 

  It seems like every single time I’m in any store at least two of the things I intend to buy will have a brand type or two that has no price. Now how am I supposed to compare the item with the other goods in the store?  It’s impossible.  I have to keep asking for the price. So annoying.

  So what I end up doing in these cases is choosing the best choice out of the items that DO have prices. That is I ignore the untagged items. The only exception to this is when there is a brand I’m pretty sure will be the best price/quality ratio from prior experience that is untagged. In that case I pickup the item and wait and watch for it to be rung up looking carefully at the price and if it’s too expensive I have to make them and the entire line behind me in the grocery store stop while I run back and put the one item back and pick up another cheaper brand. And of course I am enduring all the evil looks of annoyed people who are frustrated because they can’t buy their beer and chips as fast as they would like.

  Part of the reason this annoys me though has nothing to do with the store but everything to do with my natural paranoid conspiratorial mindset. Well in truth I’m not really a fan of conspiracy theories per se, I need evidence before I believe anything, but there’s a part of me that always theorizes the worst.

  Take for example the missing price tags. It occurs to me that if I were a evil diabolical store owner and I wanted to maximize my profits chances are very good that there are certain products by certain brands that it is in my interest to sell before others. So well if every item is un-priced or every item is priced I can’t control when people will buy things. They’ll use their own judgment. However, if I were to say remove the price tag for a brand I didn’t want people to buy, I could likely discourage the purchasing of that brand until other more profit inducing brands are sold. 

  How would that work? Well exactly like it did with me. A lot of consumers would not be inclined to seek out an employee and ask them for help either because they are too lazy, too much in a hurry, too annoyed, or too socially awkward. I’d even be willing to bet that MOST consumers won’t ask for the price. Some few will buy the untagged product anyway. But I imagine most would buy from the best choice from the remaining choices. Exactly like I do.

  So now you’ve increased your profit just by failing to tag an item. Sweet deal right? You could just move it around from product to product so that no company becomes suspicious that their product isn’t selling as much as it ought to.

  If you were an individual manager or owner of a small store you could pretty much do this with impunity and nobody would ever know or even be able to prove it. However, if you’re the manager of a store that’s part of a chain it’d be tougher. People could compare your store’s sales figures against other stores and see a discrepancy and complain about it.  But that’s only a problem if it’s at an individual store manager level. What if it happens at a higher level? What if it’s decided at a regional or national management level? Then it would hit all stores equally and not seem aberrational at all.

  Well you might say but wouldn’t the individual store employees and managers blow the whistle on such fraud?? And yes theoretically they would, if they were decent human beings and knew it was happening and knew *why* it was happening.  But what if the regional managers are much more clever than that? What if they simply cause the price tags for certain products to not print out or not be delivered or have an “error” so they have to be reprinted and resent out? Well then couldn’t it be that they could manipulate this process to increase profits without anyone noticing? It would look just like the normal error prone process.

  Note this behavior wouldn’t be against the law, at least as far as I know. So it’s entirely possible that someone doing this would see nothing wrong with it. They might not see it as deception. They might even see it as encouraging interaction with employees and discouraging antisocial behaviors. They might just think well serves them right if they buy a product they don’t want because they didn’t ask.

  But *I* would find it deplorable. Mostly because it negatively impacts ME. But also because it’s an information distortion thing. Reducing the amount of information people have available to control their choices causes people to make suboptimal decisions. That results in a market that works less efficiently. Something so simple as a missing price tag can be the bane of economic theory.

  Of course all that is just idle speculation and there’s no real good or even logical evidence based reason to believe any of it is happening. Indeed this could well be seen as a case study in the kind of nonsense non-evidence based reasoning results in. Mere speculation does not create facts. Just because something is possible doesn’t make it real. From these areas of the mind the conspiracy theories arise. But I also have always thought that you need that kind of thinking in order to be truly vigilant. There has to be a little bit of Rorschach in us or else we really will be taken for a ride one day. And so my idle mind keeps coming back to my weird theory every time I notice products without price tags.

  But that’s not all. I have other problems with missing price tags that annoy me!  Not only do I suspect the business is out to get me, I also have a tendency to think that other customers are acting against me in this global price-tag removal conspiracy! 

  Well again not really a conspiracy, but I often suspect that other customers might be purposefully removing tags in order to gain a competitive advantage. What could their motive be? Well it’s easy. Again, a tagless item is less likely to be bought for all the reasons I’ve already specified. So let’s say I want to buy a product but I don’t want anyone ELSE to buy up all of my product. One easy way to increase the likelihood of that is to remove the tag.

  In a clothing store I suspect this would be very very common. Particularly if you find a piece of clothing that’s in your size and there aren’t a lot of clothing in your size. But let’s say you can’t buy it right then but are going to come back in a few days. You might well want to remove the price tag of that item to discourage others from buying it. You might also remove the SIZE tag to prevent people from realizing it is in your size. You might also on top of all that put it in a different section where it doesn’t belong so that people are less likely to find it. All those things together would maximize the probability that the item will be there when you get back. So it’s the rational thing to do!

  Likewise in a supermarket we can imagine a person who found a GREAT deal on I dunno maybe canned foods or something and they want to stock up on a TON of them in case of the apocalypse. So maybe they buy all the ones they can right now but they can’t buy more until they get paid tomorrow. What do they do? Well it’s easy! Just remove the price tag! Again. It increases the probability that people won’t buy it.

  And all that’s just the sort of rational though kinda despicable reasons why someone might remove a price tag. There’s also the fact that people might do it just because they’re being jerks!  I know there are the kinds of people out there who just enjoy causing chaos for people. It gives them pleasure to see people annoyed. Some might even feel it is justified even in order to get people to take the prices of goods less seriously. ie they might see it as an object lesson.

  Still others might be removing the price tag in order to pull one over on the store! That is they might remove an expensive price next to a cheaper price tag and then fill their cart with the more expensive item. Then when they go up to check out they’ll see the item ring up at the more expensive price. And then… OUTRAGE! How DARE the store post the wrong PRICE!!! YOU BETTER GIVE ME A DISCOUNT RIGHT NOW!! And so it goes.

  Of course that last seems like an absurdly difficult amount of effort to get a small amount of savings. It’d be far easier just to slip the damn thing in your pocket and shoplift it. But maybe for bigger harder to shoplift items it might be the way people go.

  All of this is idle speculation. I have no evidence that anybody at all is doing ANY of this. A majority of missing tags might just be the result of some obsessive compulsive people removing tags or some clumsy people accidentally knocking tags off. Heck, I’VE probably clumsily knocked off price tags several times and never even noticed it. I’m certainly clumsy enough. But of course the more annoyed I am at the time at which I am shopping the more likely I have to dismiss these banal explanations and assume someone is screwing ME over PERSONALLY!  I even sometimes imagine that there might be a supermarket nemesis out there whose focused his whole life around tormenting my shopping experience. He’s watching my every move, keeping track of when stuff is running low in my house and then sneaks off into the supermarket to snatch the price tags off the shelves just before I arrive! BASTARD!!!  I’LL GET HIM YET!!

  Anyways anyways anyways  onward and upwards. More to think about, more to write about, more to rant about like a ranting drunken lunatic.

  You know what ELSE pisses me off with missing price tags??  It’s those DAMN stores that have NO PRICE TAGS ANYWHERE!  I really really really HATE such places. I just don’t get it. Why wouldn’t they post the price? Are they just so damn cheap that they don’t want to waste the paper or the marker or whatever?

  No. Usually such places are really upper class and there’s like this sick culture that caters to the people who are so wealthy that they don’t NEED to know the price. Ohhh I hate that. Especially restaurants that are like that. The assumption being that if you’re eating here you’ll pay whatever we damn well charge you since you’re being given the PRIVILEGE of eating at our illustrious institution.

  I don’t get how such places stay in business. I don’t understand why anyone anywhere ever would want to be associated with that kind of holier-than-thou better-than-thou arrogance. Seriously. It’s strange. I understand there is a desire in people for a sense of status in order to feed their ego. I’m not even faulting them too much for HAVING an ego. Certainly there’s plenty of people who should think better of themselves so why should I begrudge the people who actually do? I think it’s kinda sad that they need constant validation in the form of trivial financial symbols to preserve their self esteem. But hey, whatever works for you. And indeed these people’s money is undoubtedly feeding the economy.

  However, the real problem with this, is that these people are IDIOTS. They’re totally getting ripped off! Why would you let some other rich people basically play you like that???  I mean it’s SUCH a scam. Do you think those restaurants don’t ask the price when they’re ordering the ingredients for those high priced meals they charge you?? Of COURSE they do! They’re spending their fortunes wisely. It’s you who are wasting money because you can’t even evaluate what the best deal for your money is because you buy stuff without even asking for the price!

  And I suspect this kind of thing hurts new money a lot more than old money. Old money probably has a lot of traditions that give them knowledge of what places to shop at and how to know exactly what things cost so as not to be scammed. But somoene who is newly rich probably just assumes that it’s normal not to know the price and is so happy in their new found wealthy power that they’re totally like “I got this! No worries.” So they spend it without thinking.

  Maybe that’s why after a few years we find so many people with grotesque salaries are totally broke against all odds. Yup. It’s all because of missing price tags. Well that and the 200 cars and the giant mansions and the private islands they felt the urge to purchase. Sigh.

  Speaking of big purchases. Along the same lines of the missing prices, another pet peeve of mine is the hidden additional costs. Like things will be advertised as one price but then when you get the actual bill it’s somewhat higher. There’s always some excuse like that there’s this tax or this fee or some other BS that they have to pay so they HAVE to pass on the price to the consumer. Without telling them. Of course. That’s the only way it could POSSIBLY be done.  The most obvious example of this that everybody has to deal with is probably their cell phone bills. There’s always some kind of a tax added to the bill. And the systems are ALWAYS designed such that you don’t see that tax until the very very end. Sometimes you don’t even find out about it until you get your first monthly bill.  So if you’re trying to carefully budget your money suddenly your budget is thrown totally off!

  Now look I understand that companies do have to pay taxes and fees and sometimes those fees are even State specific. But there needs to be a mechanism by which people can KNOW what their final fee is going to be LONG BEFORE they make up a decision about whether or not to buy a product. Having to guess what that fee is going to be is just totally unfair and it’s a distortion of the market. Consumers are less informed consumers because they are being deceived about the cost of the thing they are trying to consume. 

  This is true of all kinds of purchases from internet to phone services to cars to houses. Extra fees. Unexpected costs. All thrown in. This is also one of the problems I have with sales taxes. It’s an information distortion. And since it distorts in every single state differently it’s even hard to follow. It’s annoying. If I go to a store with $10, I ought to be able to buy a thing that I know costs $9.99 and get my penny back. Why should I have to dig out change and do some calculation that differs with every state I’m in in order to discover if I can afford the $10 item.

  Then again I grew up in Delaware where there is no sales tax so maybe I’m biased.

  Actually income taxes are an equal market distortion for largely the same reason as sales tax. When I  am negotiating for a job I’m negotiating for gross salary which is not the right piece of information. What I REALLY need to know is how much money I will be making NET on each paycheck in order to make the most rational decision about what job to take. This is especially true when I am trying to get a job across State lines. This information distortion might severely effect me and might lead me into taking a job that pays less than I need the job to pay in order to survive in an area into which I am moving. That’s screwed up. I’d rather employers and employees computed and negotiated on Net salaries and bi-weekly paychecks.

  OK OK. Enough boring Tax Nonsense. Back to what you really care about. Supermarkets! Yup you must be a real supermarket fanatic to have read through this post this long. So for those of you who have such dedication I have a reward for you.

  For a limited time only, free of charge, you get Nephyo’s Plan to Redesign the Supermarket!

  OK here goes.

  Basically it’s really simple. We create the SMART CART.  Smart Cart? What do I mean? Well this is gonna be like an awesome pwn-cart that will make your supermarket experience a breeze.

  First it has a screen and a keyboard. And it’s voice operated. You can tell the cart the things you want and intend to buy or you can even load your shopping list from your computer at home. You can even list maximum prices on the things you are considering getting and also input prefered brands and brands you refuse to buy.  You can have coupons supersede brand preference or not depending on your whim.

  Next the cart has a GPS system. While you’re in the supermarket it displays a map to the next item on your list. Not only that but it computes the most efficient path through the supermarket to get your items in record time. And it speaks to you through an ear piece. “In ten feet, turn right into the meats aisle. Turn right now.”

  OK, next up whenever you put anything in the cart scanners within the cart pick up the item and display the price to you. Right there. No ambiguity. Whether a price is listed in the aisle or not you can ALWAYS know what things cost. If you take an item out of the cart the price disappears.  The cart shows a running total of the price of EVERYTHING you’ve put in it at any given time. INCLUDING TAX! And membership discounts. And coupons you preloaded in the cart!

  If you want to return something in your cart you can just click a button on the cart and it will route in a return to the location where that item is usually located so you can quickly return it.

  Next as you are leaving the store you don’t have any checkout. Nope. Just like the technology that scans your items to see if you’ve stolen anything, basically once you pass out the door the total costs of everything in your cart is tallied up and added to your store account where you’ll either be billed or you’ll get it immediately removed from a checking acounnt or charged on a credit card on file at the store. Easy as pie.  In addition as soon as you pass through the door an electronic signal changes the tags on all those items so the store knows you own them. Hence if you were to re-enter the store with items you’ve already bought they’d not be double charged.

  There’s also a shoot outside where you just slide things down that you don’t want and they’d be returned to the shelves and you get your money back. Basically a returns shoot. It’d be totally easy you don’t even have to talk to like anyone unless there’s a problem.

  Oh yeah did I mention everything you buy has a magnetic locking and sliding mechanism? That’s why you can slide things down the shoot without fear of like eggs getting broken or anything. It all mag-locks to the shoot bottom and is conveyed safely via conveyor directly to the restocking area where store employees deal with it from there.

  That same locking mechanism is in the cart so all the items you’ve purchased are magnetically linked to your cart so it doesn’t slide while you’re moving around.

  And when you get to your car there’s like a magnetic locking mechanism that connects your cart directly to the car. Cars are designed with a cart slot right in the back of them and you kinda just push your smart cart right in which it links to the car and you jump in the driving seat and drive off cart and all. People own their own carts and they use them at all the stores in which they shop, instead of having a different cart at each store.

  Either that or maybe the carts have like a slide that comes out in the front and the items just slide right into your car where they are magnetically locked to the trunk floor so they don’t fall over. But then what happens when you get home? I guess your trunk needs to be a smart trunk too that can move things around and put them into cloth bags for you. Or your cart can do that. Either way it works.

  Oh did I mention your cart has a pull over top? It has to. Otherwise things will get wet when you take them outside. Obviously. Duh.

  Future versions of your smart cart are even more smart. They have AI and can analyze your spending habits and come up with cost saving tips. Eventually they’ll be motorized and have their own mechanical arms so they can go and do all your shopping without you even being present. You just drive to the supermarket and push the deploy shopping cart button on your car and off it goes! You come back thirty minutes or an hour later and pick up the cart all ready to go. Easy as pie!

  And there you have it, Nephyo-market. The future of supermarkets!

  Admittedly this system will suck for the people who work in supermarkets. IT would eliminate a lot of jobs. It would also make people lazier and fatter than they already are.

  It’s also completely and utterly absurd. But you’re supposed to ignore that.

  Anyway I have other crazy ideas but I won’t bore you with them now.

  Nahhhhh. One more!  How about this instead.  We put all food in giant conveyor belts built between cities. I’m serious. You input all your food preferences and what you want to buy.  A complex routing algorithm takes the food through these conveyor belts to the city or area you are located where there are centralized pickup locations kinda like post offices where all your food is all packaged together right where you can drive down and pick it up with your cart.

  Only… Let’s make these centers have NO PARKING LOTS.  Only handicapped and baby mothers parking spots. That’s it. Everybody else has to bike to the centers. There are tons of bike racks. You bike down and attack a cart with your food right to the back of your bike and bike it back home.

  Now we’re making people healthier and making things more efficient for everyone!

  Of course that’s probably even more absurd. Thing of the insane amounts of metal that would need to be mined to build it all. Not to mention the crazy complex routing. And refrigeration! All throughout these conveyor belt tunnels. Some would probably be vacuum sealed vacuum shoots where the item just zips along at high speed without the need of conveyor belts. Anyway it would all be insanely costly to build.  But then what we ACTUALLY have, the crazy highway system and system of trains and airplanes was ALSO insanely costly to build and doesn’t seem so great a system today. It’s highly inefficient.

  So I think my idea is somewhat closer to the reality we are probably moving toward. Supermarkets will one day cease to exist. Things really will get so efficient that we can do instant ordering online. And somehow it ends up in the facility closest to you. Maybe even directly to your own door. You’ll have an ordering delivery shoot right in the back of your house.  Probably to do that we have to loosen up the association of the item with the purchaser. So that it’s not that SPECIFIC item that you ordered that you buy but simply AN item of the same type that happens to be in stock at the facility closest to yours. Something like that.

  Man this would all be a lot easier if we just had replicators. Or even teleporters. Oh well. We’ll see how things turn out.

  I’ll write more random absurdity in the future. Or maybe something coherent. Anyways, hope you are all well Xanga. Talk to you later!

  • 6:42 pm
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