Haha… oh, that’s rich. Doesn’t it just burn you to see such brute force techniques being used when some good I.T. would make it so easy?

I think that in larger stores, all the “offers” will be presentable via web services, by which I really imagined something like an RSS feed. Even last-minute price reductions are usually electronically registered on the inventory system.

Picking up a flyer is definitely a good idea, but many stores don’t, or can’t print these to keep up with the in-store price drops and specials etc.

The idea is not limited to price reductions necessarily. It can be thought of as a kind of in-store browser.

You are right about GPS and battery life etc. In fact, GPS wont work a lot of the time anyway. There are other possibilities, like Bluetooth and NFC, or even manually.

You are also right about handing a credit-card to the cashier to order a product.

The question is can such interaction be user-friendly and useful to the shopper in a way that they get used to it. Imagine that ordering the missing product is a single click. That’s better than waiting in line to see a cashier. My recent experience with ordering an out-of-stock item in Mothercare World was that it took over 10 minutes to complete – once I had the attention of a shop assistant. Interestingly, their procedure was to phone the online store and order it from there on my behalf.

These issues need thinking through. I’m glad to be in conversation with you about it.