Shopping for men

Monday, 16 April, 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.

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