Making shopping easier

Men generally don't like to shop for clothes. Men usually have their favourite shirt, favourite jeans and a favourite sweater and they are good. Shoe shopping, for some women an activity bordering on the therapeutically, is for men nothing else then shoe replacing. It is like shopping for milk. The old milk carton is empty and needs replacing, just as the shoes need replacing because of a hole. There is no point in trying to find a better or nicer milk carton, the usual will do, thank you very much. For shoes and clothing in general, this doesn't work. The old stuff is never available and the whole selection procedure starts over each time I want to buy shoes.

What we should have (and probably do) is a unique code for each piece of attire. You buy the stuff, note the code and wear it. Then when your favourite jeans have a hole, you go to this website, type in the code and voila, they'll send you another one of your favourite pair of jeans.

For groceries this scheme could be simplified. I was thinking about a bar code scanner next to the garbage can. If you throw the package of something away, you think, do I need this and this replaced and if yes, you scan the barcode. A computer will then automatically order a new carton of juice or whatever it is that you need. Alternatively, it could just add an item to your shopping list, which would be more feasible, but far less cool.