Spaced-OoooO-Out

Shopping for men

Mon, 16 Apr 2007

I bumped in to a friend in Tesco's yesterday, both as we were looking for items (water filters and Quorn as it happens). Now shopping (particularly grocery shopping!) seems to be something that most men don't, shall we say, enjoy. Its more a case of SAS planning, get in, do the job, get out as quickly as possible. That means some kind of list and prioritising their order in the shop so that they can be grabbed in the least amount of time. Groan... OK, its a spatial (aka GIS) problem (and Andy really did want to minimise his time). We have locations of items for "picking" and we want to minimise the route to collect them all. Classic travelling salesman network problem with a real world application. I gather from Andy (a database developer) that this is standard fare in warehouses ("back-of-shop") and "us guys" now want it standard fare "front-of-shop".

So, please, Tesco, can you offer optimised shopping routes for all of your stores if I give you a pick list?? This would also have a dual purpose in allowing you to optimise your grocery shopping service as well. Thanks.

Ken wrote at 2007-04-16 19:53:

It is standard for stores like Tesco to plan the internal layout very carefully to ensure that key items are located in such a way that we are forced to go past things we might not want. The logic being we might just pick something off the shelf and spend more. Armed with knowledge they generate from their storecard database they know what product mix each store should stock...and can lay their store out effectively to optimise unplanned purchases. They want you to browse, not get through as quickly and efficiently as possible!
What might be an interesting exercise is comparing the travelling salesman route for a set of items between different stores...and different supermarkets. Now, if only we could get them to peel their roofs off we could do it with everyone's current favorite...SAT-NAV. What about TOM-TOMs on shopping trolleys? Or am I losing the plot? ;-)
Quite how it would work given the number of times they change the damn location of things is beyond me though!
Anyway, they do already offer this service - it's called 'Tesco home shopping' and is as optimum as you could want surely...no need to even go there.

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