Like many people I found myself with an interest in traditional folk music in 2000 that coincided with the release of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Of particular interest was the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

The song, if you’ve never heard it, was originally recorded in 1928, but likely written in the late 1800s and is told from the point of view of a hobo. The narrator implores his other hobo friends to travel with him on his trip to Big Rock Candy Mountain by listing all the great features that make it a veritable paradise. Some of those features include empty boxcars, cops with wooden legs, jails made of tin, and barns full of hay.

Wait, what?

What always piqued my curiosity about this song was the idea that narrator, who could wish for anything, could only imagine solutions to his problems within the narrow context of his own life. For a 1920s hobo the problems he would have faced were full box cars and uncomfortable sleeping arrangements in barns. And they were big enough problems that this was an entire category of song (according to Wikipedia), with many others revolving around the same theme. The wish for someone in those times wasn’t a bed in a house, but a barn full of hay.

I’ve been thinking more about this recently as I think about the future of my industry (retail/ecommerce) and about the work we spend most of our time doing. One issue we have repeatedly tried to address is list making. We want to make it easier for our customers to be able to make a list and bring it into store with them. But all of our attempts so far have been barns full of hay (if even that). The reason we’ve failed at solving this problem, and many others, is that we’ve approached it like an issue our customers have with making lists, not the reasons our customers have for making a list in the first place.

“Lists” is not an issue our customers have of being able to create and maintain a list of products they need. Though there are certainly opportunities to improve upon with that process, the real opportunity is helping our customers know what products they need without them needing to make a list and then getting the products to them before they actually do need them.

What if your customers didn’t need to make a list? Could their stuff know when you needed more of it and add itself to a list? What if they didn’t need to go to the store? What if your customer could make a list of items they wanted and have their weekly groceries show up at their door? Even that answer is just barns full of hay. Why not let your customer send you their meal plan and all the ingredients showed up at their door each morning, except for the ones we know they already have? There was a time when milk, eggs, and even news were delivered to your door each morning – why not that level of service, aided by technology, today?

None of these ideas are particularly revolutionary, but they illustrate how reframing the problem provides for a potentially much better solution. Would you rather have a list that was more usable than pen and paper, or never having to write a list again?

Excuse me now, I’ve got to go hit the hay.