Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

While I don't think this is likely to work out (they're going to have an army of employees constantly wandering up and down the aisles at Wal-Mart?), I have been waiting for some time to find a site that indexes the "buy in store" links found in a lot of brick-and-mortar stores' online counterparts. If I could just do a Google Product Search that had the option to limit results to "stores within X miles of ZIP Code YYYYY", that would be amazingly awesome. I would even be OK with a system that doesn't guarantee in-stock-ness; I don't mind calling to confirm. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to find e.g. a laptop battery or a specific pair of headphones without waiting for them to ship to me, and instead of going to one central price-comparison search engine, I have to think of all the stores in my area that might have them (Circuit City, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, on and on and on) and search each one's web site individually. I would even be happy with a site that just spiders out to a limited set of stores and lets you select which ones to include with check-boxes.

So please, somebody, steal my idea and make some money with it. I'm too lazy to execute it and I don't have the business sense to turn a profit, but I desperately want it to exist so I can use it myself.