I do the grocery shopping in our house, and the grocery store we use most often has a discount card program where you get special sale prices only if you let the cashier scan your discount card each time you buy food. So, basically, the store knows what you’ve bought because it’s all indexed to your discount card number. Since they’re collecting this information, I’d like it if they’d provide it to me via a web service so that my grocery list program could access it.

Quicken can access my bank account to tell me what checks have cleared. Why can’t my recipe software tell me that, based on what the grocery store says, I have plenty of cumin but will need to buy corriander before I can make the chicken masala recipe I’m looking at?