There is some scope for a brick and mortar toy store provided they are willing to be double as a pseudo-playcenter.
Toy aisles and toy stores are frequently populated by exhausted parents standing around while their children entertain themselves checking out the toys. The kids are happy enough. The parents are content just to have a few minutes to themselves. Toy retailers typically try and dissuade this behavior.
Meanwhile indoor playgrounds/play centers are a huge and growing business. They are happy for parents to unleash their children while they make their money from entry charges, selling cups of coffee to the parents and snacks for the kids.
Despite having a huge inventory of toys play centers never actually sell toys that I have seen. Tearful children have to leave their new favorite ride on racing car (or whatever) behind when they leave.
>Meanwhile indoor playgrounds/play centers are a huge and growing business. They are happy for parents to unleash their children while they make their money from entry charges, selling cups of coffee to the parents and snacks for the kids.
There's a mom and pop place like this near me. They rented an old dead big box store (I remember shopping there when it was a Circuit City) and filled it with bounce houses and arcade games.
They charge $10/kid admission. Adults are not allowed in the bounce houses, and they've got an area set up with tables and free WiFi for the parents. They'll charge you $3.79 for a soda, so overpriced for sure but not quite movie theater or ballpark pricing.
My son begged to have his birthday party there this year. The parties have to be the big revenue driver, as it was $300 for twelve kids' worth of Domino's Pizza and use of a party room for an hour.
That business model appeared not to work in the 90s, because they all closed down, I wonder why. Unsustainable business model? Good business model but taking on too much debt? Kids get bored after a couple visits and don't come back? Rising rents? Admission prices too high?
Around me there was a Discovery Zone and there was two more independent ones that opened up around the same time as Discovery Zone and closed a little after too. From what I could gather, seems like the business model just didn't work, at least not at the time.
The DZ locations, at least where I lived, were in prime spots, and it was a time when they couldn't build strip malls fast enough to keep up with demand.
Now you've got an oversupply of dead big box stores and not enough ideas of what to do with them.
I wonder what kind of liability insurance, regulatory compliance, etc. is required for a business like this (in the US, where any injury to a child seems culturally likely to lead to a lawsuit). Mom-and-pop day cares exist in my area, so clearly it's possible to have a child-centered business without the backing of corporate lawyers -- but how big of a risk are they taking should something happen?
I think there's a pretty good opportunity here for a large format combined playspace/toystore. Build out the toy area around some hands-on demo spaces, and include the normal playspace items nearby with climbing structures and coffee/alcohol for the parents. The key is: charge admission, then credit back the admission price toward the purchase of any new toy.
People are terrible calculating sunk cost, and I'm pretty sure that the pre-paid $15 admission credit makes a $29 toy look like a "steal", even if you could buy it on Amazon for $24. In fact, I'll bet most parents would be hard-pressed to leave the experience without buying something for every child.
There is another option: a small bank that does not trade derivates and where people within know the customers not only by an excel sheet [1]. But then again this is impossible to scale. It's still nice to see.
> where people within know the customers not only by an excel sheet
Unless you don't count individual actions, this is probably nonexistent.
My hometown had a very small regional bank with roughly 3 branches total. One manager was caught skimming funds out of the vault. She was responsible for the closing amount at the end of the day, but she didn't know that there was another person who double checked behind her.
The other was someone who was skimming funds from deployed military and fixed-income retirees. I don't recall the exact process for deployed military, but it involved removing extra funds from their accounts when an auto-pay transaction (wireless bill, mortgage, etc.) hit. I don't know the details like if she somehow bumped the transaction amount or added a small transaction fee.
The fixed-income retirees was simple. When an elderly person came in to cash a check, she would palm a bill or two and short the customer.
The column type would have to be the type of the encrypted value. The type of the unencrypted data could not be enforced by the DB and you would have to rely on code doing the correct thing.
I am however extremely wary of doing it that way. I don't know your requirements of course.
Here is the thing - encrypted stuff is just a weird encoded string. So I can’t really use columns normally.
What I really need is just a huge table with two fields: “token”, “content”
And the token is basically the primary key but encrypted with whatever encryption.
You could even do foreign keys this way.
Hmm I suddenly have an idea. What about a layer above the database that basically enforces foreign keys and joins in this way to support end to end encryption? The content would reference ENCRYPTED foreign keys. Only clients would decrypt stuff.
>What I really need is just a huge table with two fields: “token”, “content”
Sounds more like a key value store and less like a relational database. Although you can store key value data in a relational db of course, there may be a better tool for the job.
>Almost no one reads them, so they should not be enforceable.
It varies depending on where in the world you are but its actually pretty unclear as to whether they are enforceable. Or at least, a specific set of T&Cs with a specific user/customer may be found to be unenforceable for a wide range of reasons.
Of course, the company that puts the T&Cs in front of you isn't going to tell you that.
>However during the time in jail for crimes related to my addiction the only thing on my mind the entire stay was, "can't wait to get out of here and get that first dose again".
Speaking to someone who had recently been released, he talked about people shooting up in the car two minutes after being released. Friends and sometimes even family members would be there to meet them at their release and would bring along drugs for them to consume at the first possible instant as some kind of "welcome back" present.
Most likely but thats not 100%. Unfortunately the specs may not be correct if the manufacturers of the individual input components and materials have not been honest.
For example there is a hospital in Australia (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/lead-levels-in-perth-c...) that has been massively delayed due to lead mysteriously appearing where there should be none and asbestos also appearing where there should be none. From what I know, the sources have turned out to be manufacturers in China either knowingly misrepresenting their products or using contaminated materials in their own manufacturing.
Assuming the spring water company is actually complying with the limits. That would also be worth testing. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if a spring water company was lax with ongoing testing and making sure to test the water once it has been through their whole process and is in bottles.
There was a case with cranberry juice in Australia (I think it was) where school kids tested store bought cranberry juice and found it contained zero vitamin C. Something about the way the juice was processed and bottled destroyed all the vitamin C but no one had ever bothered to test the juice after processing and bottling.
Toy aisles and toy stores are frequently populated by exhausted parents standing around while their children entertain themselves checking out the toys. The kids are happy enough. The parents are content just to have a few minutes to themselves. Toy retailers typically try and dissuade this behavior.
Meanwhile indoor playgrounds/play centers are a huge and growing business. They are happy for parents to unleash their children while they make their money from entry charges, selling cups of coffee to the parents and snacks for the kids.
Despite having a huge inventory of toys play centers never actually sell toys that I have seen. Tearful children have to leave their new favorite ride on racing car (or whatever) behind when they leave.