HoodFind^TM

I recently got a queasy feeling in my stomach about my goal to become the default website for finding any type of sale, special or promotion in “your neighborhood” with HoodFind.com. Was my unease due to the fact that the “best businesses” rarely need to have a sale, special or promotion? I largely dismissed this possibility because all you have to do is pick up a newspaper to see that well known, successful businesses often have sales, specials and promotions. So what caused my quesiness?

The first reason has to do with the fact that it’s hard for people to understand the true quality and value of an offer through repeated false claims made by retailers. An excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point isolates this point nicely:

“The whole premise behind sales, is that we, as consumers, are very aware of the prices of things and will react accordingly: we buy more in response to lower prices and less in response to higher prices. But if we’ll buy more of something even if the price hasn’t been lowered, then what’s to stop supermarkets from never lowering their prices? What’s to stop them from cheating us with meaningless “everyday low price” signs every time we walk in?”.

The second reason is that as a society, we have been collectively buried in sales and special offers that have little interest to us on an individual basis. This “blanket effect” of sales and specials - in the mail, on TV, and on the internet - often causes us to tune them out entirely, even if we, as consumers, find value in them.

Identifying these two reasons has helped remind me why we’re in this fight in the first place. Up until now, we have not had a way to easily catalog, find, filter and compare the types of sales, specials and promotions that we would truly be interested in or that are even worthy of our interest in the first place. Malcolm Gladwell continues in The Tipping Point that the answer to the question “What’s to stop them (retailers) from cheating us with meaningless offers?” lies in the ability of a few, but devoted group of “price vigilantes” or “Market Mavens” to communicate to the greater marketplace (i.e., complaining to the manager, telling their friends, etc.) that better values can be found elsewhere. Therefore, it’s up to services like HoodFind to carry the torch of the “Market Maven” and even step it up a notch, especially since the technology is now at our fingertips.