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> I don't need or use an app to interact with any of those things, and when I have been offered apps, they've been worse than useless.

A store clerk recently invited me to download their app, and when I showed her that it requested every single permission, she was still baffled as to why I would want to cancel the download.

> Why can I find a shelf stocker in Target and he can use his li'l belt computer to tell me where anything is in the store, down to the shelf, and how many they have, but I can't have access to that information before I enter the store?

Home Depot's mobile app will tell you exactly where an item is on the shelf, including aisle, section, and level. They even have a map so you can find items that aren't on numbered aisles. It's fantastic.

The Lowes app has a similar feature - it really is useful.

Home Depot is terrible at actually tracking their inventory. There app is useless when it tells you where the item is, only to find out that they actually don't have any in stock despite what their tracking system says.

I order easily 20x as many items from Amazon, and never had an email saying "oops, we actually don't have any in stock".

And this is why the stores don't give out their actual inventory numbers to the public: because they can't accurately track those numbers. Things get stolen, lost in storage, and moved off their shelf to promotional displays.

And then people complain about how "useless" the app is. This is much less of a problem for Amazon where there aren't any thieving customers in the store.

It is useless if the information provided isn't correct. In some cases, it's actually worse than useless.

> but I can't have access to that information before I enter the store?

Because why would they want you to have that information? They are making money on you not knowing where stuff is - they're hoping that you'll pick up additional items you didn't plan to buy as you wander around the shop looking for the things you need.

Ditto for "worse than useless" apps - they are not meant to help you, they are meant to take money from you.

So pg recently wrote again, that the best way to get money is to make something people want. But it's not true. Time and again, businesses from Comcast to Target, to Uber, to browser toolbar makers, to the guys that give away pendrives that secretly install as keyboard and open their website, to your random SaaS "we'll kill e-mail and your puppy" toilet-paper startup - all of them keep proving that the best practical way to make money is to lie, cheat and bully people into paying.

We need a really strong, aggressive pushback against dishonest business practices, and that includes pretty much the entire advertising industry. We're already drowning in manure, having to use stuff built for the reverse of stated purpose.

A lot of brick-and-mortar store chains do that in France, actually (Darty, FNAC, etc.).

They have an online store, and on each product page there is a field "stock in your preferred store". That's very handy; you can even order it online and pick it up in the store, so you don't have to pay or wait for delivery.

Several times I was planning to buy online, but since I found out on their site that their price is competitive and I can get it today, I ended up taking my car to a brick-and-mortar shop.

> Several times I was planning to buy online, but since I found out on their site that their price is competitive and I can get it today, I ended up taking my car to a brick-and-mortar shop.

This is strong competitive advantage of brick&mortar stores. I actually buy more locally than on-line for the sole reason that I'm impatient and when I need something, I need it ASAP, so I prefer to just go and buy it instead of waiting few days (same-day delivery is not common in Poland yet).

Would it work out for you if you just had to install one app for all of those uses - e.g. one generic "physical web" app?

From Roy Fielding's thesis[0]:

"""

REST provides a set of architectural constraints that, when applied as a whole, emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems. I describe the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles, contrasting them to the constraints of other architectural styles.

"""

Amazon is one of the few companies that has actually committed to this. There's no reason the Internet of Things can't follow this pattern too.

[0] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm