App for keeping tabs on cheapest prices in grocery stores
Creating a grocery store with a selling point being its low prices at that certain location is always a slam dunk. Considering that all the stores are keeping their prices in some online system why is there still no way for checking out where is the cheapest way to collect all the needed groceries. I mean we have offerings for the cheapest price for everything else — from sneakers to iPhones, even though the cheapest ones are certainly replicas. The only difference being the location, making up the extra you have to pay for shipping. Considering we’ll be getting our groceries on our doorstep (like the British had/have their milk) or thrown into our autonomous taxis soon enough why not have that information on food products as well.
To drive the concept across, let’s say you have three different stores near you. differing in quality. Today you have a shopping list and soon your refrigerator will know what you are missing as well. The app will be summing up the prices and take into account the shipping price. Also the app will optimise between how much groceries you’re willing to take home every time and how many times you wish to do it in a week. If you do a drive-by with your autonomous taxi instead of shipping them to your home, the price would be even less. I know many think drones will do the delivering, but I’m not much of a fan on that concept. Drones can help people who need prescription medications (for example) and can’t leave their home for a visit to the pharmacy— medication packs are small and there aren’t that many clients for the skies to be clustered with drones. Which is why I believe in Estonian Starship robots. Nor do I believe in the popularity of flying cars — they’re not needed once we optimise our traffic thanks to autonomous vehicles and work from home (or in virtual reality), thus eradicating traffic jams. For the same reason Boring company (massive tunnel roads) will probably only help a few cities in the world where people drive to work for couple hours so optimising won’t have enough impact. But on that stuff some other time.
Essentially the whole concept of stores sharing their prices and giving people who doesn’t have the need for the best cheese…the opportunity to buy the worst cheese by informing people of the cheapest offering. Essentially one of the many changes saving people from starvation once workplace automation really becomes severe…are low prices achieved due to automation. As the production, distribution and costs of other retail processes will be minimised they will need to lower the prices to have clients. To keep the economy going. Otherwise they’ll have a storage full of products made for a super low marginal/variable cost, but offered at the the same price to skyrocket the profit margin. Essentially they will go sour/bad when it comes to food products. Only way out is letting the customer know of the discount price not just in the stores of one franchise, but integrating the information on those offerings. Especially awesome would be knowing what products are to be the next being offered at a low price — next week or month. That way your home AI could suggest buying certain products this week and next ones the following in order to minimise costs. By knowing what you want to and what you could cook from the products you have it can plan the purchasing schedule. Also, as it has information on the expiry date of each product (embedded in the information in the database of the stores) it can take that into account when planning.

