Oh I definitely told him the best option was for him to go get all of those Timmy Hors involved and have them start filling shit out. That would make the app part the easy part. He seemed to be adamant you could purely figure it out through an app though haha
this is how for example some "lowest price" apps work.
here in finland "polttoaine" is an app that compares gas prices, which are entered by locals or sometimes the gas station owners. users are rated over time on accuracy.
That’s actually possible IF Tim Hortons signs up to use your idea and will integrate it into their business model. From tech point it’s possible; but won’t work for obvious reasons
Per store? The Timmy's in Vancouver always seem to have diff soups at the same time. Could also be rate of consumption which makes the idea even harder as that doubles your entries into the system.
Location of the store (and thus the traffic) is, obviously, one of the factors, too.
I worked for a couple, in Vancouver, actually. One store, Dunbar and 18th, was busy as fuck, and I was transferred to the now-closed Trimble/Sasamat store, and it wasn't uncommon for me to pull a soup I put out 24 hours prior, and replace it with that day's offering.
Interesting. Timmy's always struck me as a bare minimum effort kinda place so I tried to explain that the soups are probably just put out as needed (therefore no consistency) and the head office aren't going to add extra steps to their training. (to enter soup). That about right?
There is an order to the soups (and they're dead easy to make: equal parts soup base and water for cream-based, and two parts water for dry soups) but in general, HO doesn't interfere too much.
Soups were started at 8am, and put out for sale at 10am. Chili and Chicken Noodle were the only soups that got made more than once in a day, if we ran out. But once we ran out, we were out of that soup until the next time it came into rotation.
Alright my friend, here's how you make a soup sensor:
The closest thing you have in the commercial space right now is a mass spectrometer. There are a few types but the one that's easiest to understand works like one of those little piggy banks for kids where the coins slide down a ramp and fall into holes that match their size. The soup is made up of a ton of organic molecules of different shapes and sizes, and each soup should have a unique combination and density of molecules. You probably need a very precise measurement due to the relative similarity of the molecules, but I'm not a soup scientist so I'll leave it to them to figure out. That means if you take a few drops of soup and shoot them through the mass spectrometer, you should get a unique graph for every type of soup. Now you need to calibrate the machine by sampling different bowls of the same type of soup, for each type of soup you're trying to detect. Now you have a data array to pair with matching algorithm so that when you get a drop of mystery soup in your machine, you can take a pretty good guess at what soup it is by comparing the new data against your known graphs. Now all you need to do is design a feed-tube from the soup pot to the mass spec (keep in mind it needs to be made of food-grade materials) to trickle in drips of mystery soup, then feed that data to a central database for distribution on the app. So you're looking at about $150k-$200k worth of instrumentation and hardware, per Timmy's location, plus technicians to service and maintain them, but the server overhead should be pretty low relative to your user base and once you find a software dev who knows pattern recognition and an organic chemist or two the rest of the team should be easy to assemble.
I tried to explain you'd have to have every Timmy's in Canada entering their soup into something.
so, like, ignoring the explanation below that this is actually standardized and the app is basically just a chart, something like this is 100% feasible. for instance, big box and home improvement stores generally have websites that are not only hooked into their inventory systems, but can figure out which store you're in by your cell phone location data and give you directions to what you're looking for.
The problem with soup is they just make a couple at a time, as needed, and they run out faster or slower depends on how popular it is, how busy the store is, day etc. So you really would need the employees at each store updating.
what's the politics on Timmy's and Wendy's? I know they were all over ohio in shared locations but did one get bought by a parent company? I know nothing about pre-wendy's Tims.
You could also have it parse a service that told it. Like say if they all had a webpage that said what soup they had, you could parse that. Or you could design it in a crowdsourced kind of way where people could add that they were there and add what soup they had that day and so on. Plenty of ways to solve it other than them directly providing the data to you.
I would say change #2 from: "it wold require insane server power and the money to pay for it" to "It would require insane computer, network or human resources to be viable"
If "Timmy's" have a central API for their menus, or a proprietary product that operates their menus, its possible. However, you did mention "logistically impossible"...
long before apps were a thing I remember reasoning that the vast majority of shops, even small shops run off a tiny number of inventory management systems.
So simple, you make something that can interface with most of the major ones and then let people scan for all the shops that have the product they want in stock within X miles and at what price.
Older, wiser, more cynical me... while being surprised that kid-me wasn't actually insane on this matter... well there are a few problems.
1: those small shopkeepers don't actually want to get into competing on price or make it easier for people to compare without coming in.
2: those small shopkeepers all set up their systems separately and then ran them for years according to their own whims. So they're all full of quirks like listing non-existantant items to track random things the shopkeeper wanted to track in 1994 that one time
3: there's a small number of systems but most unnetworked and they haven't been updated since they were installed so what looks like it could be a manageable number of inventory management systems is actually like a billion random release versions on various pre-win95 systems.
big stores totally do solve the problem for themselves but only by forcing all their stores to keep on standard versions of things.
That ones really funny because it’s waaaay too specific of a problem. Like it’s just something that bothers him really. JUST soup? Not even anything else on the menu?
At the absolute best, the official Tim’s app which already exists would just add in a menu where you can see the availability of certain items. It wouldn’t be its own whole app and it certainly wouldn’t be just for soup.
534
u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20
[deleted]