Think about shopping and what we consume. Most of the things I consume week-to-week are predictable. Some are from brand loyalty. I can guarantee you I’ll drink Dr Pepper at least three times this week. Some are economical. If any tub of oatmeal is under $2, I’ll pick it up and eat oatmeal for breakfast every other day until I run out. I have a pretty constant usage of toilet paper, soap, and more durable things like bath towels or undershirts.
Everybody has at least some goods that they’re like this with. Many of us hate shopping. So why am I spending 30 minutes a week at the store, hunting items I need too rarely to learn where they are, or wasting brain cycles analyzing the prices of competing brands that are truly fungible?
I am seeking or proposing a service that would ship bulk personalized resupply crates to your house on a regular basis for a fixed fee. The major retailers already do this kind of automated inventory management; I’m just talking about extending it to the household, or eliminating the middleman.
I think most of us would be willing to pay a premium to a company that could, given information about our shopping history and personal habits, reliably figure out the stuff that I go through in a week and send it to me. I worry not about erosion of privacy - the retailers are already tracking this information about us, often at the personal level, and we don’t get anything out of it now.
What about learning of new products? From the consumer point of view, screw ‘em. Not even seeing it in the store means no temptation to go out of budget and buy things you didn’t even know you needed. From the marketers’ point of view, it must be enticing to be able to piggyback free samples on a resupply directly into the consumer’s home, maybe with the goal of getting a manual addition to the next order.
Lots of big online stores like Amazon and Alice.com do something like this, and they not only don’t charge for it, they give you a discount. You can tell them to send you X amount of whatever every 1/2/3/4 weeks, and they do it.
Heck, I just signed up with a place that sends out dog food on a schedule. Once again, I got a 15% discount for signing up.
I think the OP has the right idea and certainly the right mindset about shopping and products, which is admirable and a bit too rare for for my preference. The idea of a system that would keep you stocked with basics is a good one, in theory, and goes back to house-to-house delivery of milk, etc.
But it disturbs me, because the process would NOT stop with the things you’ve signed up for and are giving them usage information on; it would become the thin end of a wedge to find ways to not just sell you more crap, but obtain yet more precise marketing data and make that wedge ever sharper. Blithely saying “they already track everything anyway” is not a lot different from saying “the cops search anything they want anyway (so they may as well be able to search my car and house any time they want).”
If widely implemented, this kind of “service” would become equivalent to removing our control of our spending and personal economies entirely, and just turning our wallets over to a third party to spend as they choose… all completely for our comfort and convenience, of course.
I think we’re already way too far down this road; giving away that last measure of control and resistance to an industry that feeds itself on our willing abdication of judgment… yes, it would be terribly convenient, but not for the individuals.
Subscribe & Save is the way to go–free shipping and a discount of 5% to 20%. I use the service for a number of basics that I go through on a predictable schedule. So, drew870mitchell, is your fee going to be a 25% discount or even higher?
I think the service would need some hefty algorithms to be fully automated and useful.
For instance, I like a particular hand soap and if it’s on sale (about once every 4 months) I buy a ton at once and store it. Same for toilet paper.
Also, what if the store doesn’t have the right item at the time of shopping? Does it get a different brand? Does it get the same brand but slighty different flavor/scent/size? If I normally get a spaghetti squash and the store is out of those, does it get a butternut squash or a zucchini, or nothing?
Who decides on expiration date? If I’m at the store I’ll rummage through the bagged salads and milk to get the items with the latest date. But if the store is picking my products, it behooves them to move the items that are expiring soonest.
I like Amazon’s service and I use it for a couple dry goods (they don’t have a lot of the stuff I’d like to subscribe to yet ) and I can see a system like yours being useful for someone who eats mostly out of cans and boxes, but I think the system breaks down when it comes to fresh food, perishable food or seasonal food. I also think it keeps you from being able to comparison shop, so it’d only be good for someone with pretty loose purse strings.
The internet ate my post but the summary is that I only buy things when I have to or when they are on sale (and usually buy them on sale before I have to).
The only reason I’d be against this is is shopping is the main reason I leave my apartment. If I had this serevioce my human contact would drop drastically.
) and I can see a system like yours being useful for someone who eats mostly out of cans and boxes, but I think the system breaks down when it comes to fresh food, perishable food or seasonal food. I also think it keeps you from being able to comparison shop, so it’d only be good for someone with pretty loose purse strings.