The last time I went to Japan, around 2010-2012, coke cans already had screw on caps.
A variation on the mobile car wash: a 25-year-old gearhead friend of mine wanted to start a company that would deliver gasoline directly to people’s cars at home. Basically Uber Eats for unleaded. He said he had asked a few people who said they would be interested in that kind of service even if it cost a few cents more than going to the fuel station.
I was treading cautiously (to avoid humiliating him in front of his family) when I advised him to enquire about insurance requirements for the truck.
Back in the late 1970’s I discovered snail slime and recognized it as having potential in the cosmetics industry everyone thought I was nuts I was never able to perfect a method for harvesting the slime. I only played with it for about a month and then gave up on it. Today it is a viable business.
Ideas are not really worth much unless you figure that if you are doing nothing but turning in ideas for one percent of the action to people who know how to realize your idea. Most people expect far too much just for an idea. Every step in development has a value attached to it. i
That exact service is commonplace anywhere boats and yachts are docked. Mobile tankers filled with diesel (or gasoline, but mostly diesel) drive up to the house, haul a long hose out back to the dock & refuel the boat. Or do something similar within a marina where they get the truck as close as they can and snake the hose down the marina walkways to whichever boat(s) need filling.
That’s also how most general aviation planes are fueled. You park the plane and a fuel truck comes to you. Those aren’t driving on public roads (much), but they are usually road legal vehicles that could be.
Around here, oh, about 15ish years ago, it was Bikini Coffee Co. (or something very close to that).
Young college age ladies, working in one of those drive-up coffee kiosks, serving crap coffee wearing bikini tops.
The story was, it started as a college kid’s business course project. Kept it going for a few years, even expanded to 3 spots and then “poof”, gone over night.
Should have served better coffee
Or some fifty years earlier.
It the mid 1950s the family of my then teen aged mom got their first tv. Her grandfather lived with them and had moderate dementia. He didn’t quite get tv and thought that if we can see them, they can see us. He was mortified when my mom would wear a nightgown in front of the tv at night.
After the Soviet collapse and peace breaking out I was laid off of the military contractor where I was working. One of the more minor misses were the vapor degreasers. Hold your glasses just below the condensing cold trap a few seconds and they were sparkling clean.
I mentioned it a few posts up.
It is HUGE in the PNW. There are regional chains of Bikini Baristas. Of the 10 coffee drive-thrus within a mile of me…2 are bikini drive-thrus and there is always a line.
The umpteen times I got plastered in a bar (those days are gone), I couldn’t care less if my glasses were clean or not. I couldn’t look straight anymore anyway.
I managed to brain-fart my initial skim read as a “Second Amendment” thing, and trust me, I was even more confused than you.
My brother, until he finally went completely crazy, was the master of the genre.
He was convinced that he could build a better private jet than anything out in the market. He wasn’t an engineer, but had read a number of books on aircraft design, although he had to skip the math because it was too complicated. But he knew how to design a better jet.
There were so many over the years, and I’ve pushed them out of my mind because it was too frustrating talking to him about it. He would make up his mind and nothing you said could make him listen.
He had hundreds of ideas, but never built a single one, let alone a working model or even detailed drawings.
Reminds me of the places that advertise “topless bartenders”, and it turns out they’re guys.
Ahem.
In Manila, there are services in the parking garages of shopping malls which will clean your car while you go shopping or watch a movie. They don’t use a big tanker but rather a little hand truck for their cleaning fluid. Minimal water is used.
Do you feel violated?
Drive-Thru Pizza.
Basically think like Sbarro or Cici’s where you can buy a pizza by the slice, but you can get it via Drive-Thru and selling it by the slice eliminates the need to have to have an extremely wide Drive-Thru window. They’d make 20 different pizzas and you can mix and match by buying as many different slices you wanted.
I think the fact I literally have never seen this concept probably means it doesn’t actually work. I’ve seen pizza sold out of food trucks or food carts, but I’ve literally never seen Drive-Thru Pizza at all. (And he’s I know McDonald’s briefly had the McPizza)
PLANO, Texas, Mar. 30, 2021 — After becoming the first national pizza brand to offer Contactless Curbside Pickup, Pizza Hut is doubling down on safety and convenience and launching The Hut Lane™ , a dedicated digital order pick-up window available at over 1,500 locations across the country with more to come.
Although I guess it’s not exactly like a traditional fast food drive thru because you order online.
We’ve had drive thru pizza here in Rhode Island for a long time. We’re just lazy and want drive thru everything.
This exactly. I bet that when Youtube went through the roof, lots of people said to themselves: “A website where people can upload videos and watch other people’s videos for free, ad-funded! I had that idea!” But the truth is that the idea isn’t worth much if you’re not actually implementing in. Start-ups are being taken over for the business (even nascent) that they have built up, not for the mere idea.