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I've had a similar idea, but it involved supermarkets and selling data to governments and companies for economic statistics and makershare data, respectively.

• rhizome 14y ago
  You've just invented the market research industry. Look up Catalina, who has been in this business for ages (as has Nielsen), and is the backend for at least some of the rewards cards in your wallet.
  • gcmartinelli 14y ago
    as far as I know, they collect the data manually (people actually go there and ask how much of each product has been sold). but I may be mistaken
    • rhizome 14y ago
      No, they don't. I worked for a company who did this (as well as partnered with both Nielsen and Catalina for customer-level data) and all of our data arrived in text files (CSV, TSV, etc.) exported from their POS systems.