Random Thoughts From Marybeth

Froogle Local

There are many people out there who have a day-after-Thanksgiving tradition of getting up early and joining large crowds of holiday shoppers for all of the "Black Friday" sales. I am not one of these people. I like shopping well enough, I just don't tolerate "early" or "crowds" well.

If you are one of these brave people, Google has launched a new Froogle feature that can help you plan your shopping trip. Go to Froogle and type in the product and your city or zip code and you'll get a list of stores with the product prices along with a map showing the stores' locations.

Google gets the inventory information from a third-party inventory database. For many items, this may work quite well but I did a search for "xBox 360 Louisville" and got almost 100 results. I'm guessing the results were stores that were advertising the xBox and not necessarily ones that had in stock.

I'm just glad I don't work in any of those stores. Their employees will be spending the next few days telling customers that they know what is in the store's inventory better than Froogle does. Many of the customers will refuse to believe this.

Anyway...this feature does look like a useful tool for most gift shopping. You can sort results by price, distance, and product rating to make your choices and then plan your route.