Three businesses I wish I'd thought of...

Occasionally some new business comes along that breaks the mold and I have an "I wish I'd thought of that" moment. Here are three of those for me:

Pods These are those movable storage containers. Remodeling? Moving? Have some stuff you need to store? Rather than drag it all to the storage facility yourself, Pods will bring a storage device to you and you fill it at your own convenience. Then you can keep it at your place or they'll haul it back and store it at their facility. Brilliant.

Netflix The through the mail video store. This is one I really didn't "get" until I signed up to do it. Now I'm a believer. I go online at Netflix and choose movies that I'm interested in seeing. (I signed up for the $9.99/month, one movie at a time plan. You can have more movies out at once for a higher monthly fee.) They send me my movie. I watch it at my convenience and then send it back in the postage paid envelope. No due dates. No late fees. No trips to the store. When they receive my movie back, they send me the next one on the list. So very cool.

I've found that Netflix gets movies to me in about a day and that they receive them back and send my next movie out about as quickly. I was surprised by the speed. And they seem to have everything ever made. Even lots of documentaries, which I love.

Dream Dinners /Your Other Kitchen, etc. These are those places where you go and assemble a month's worth of dinners for your family. You don't do the planning, shopping, or cleanup. You just show up, assemble, and take the dinners home to freeze them.

I'll admit that when these bulk cooking businesses first started showing up on the scene I thought it was nuts. And it's still not something I could see myself using. But apparently it's filling a niche and I'm starting to hear the women in my school, neighborhood, etc. talk about using them. It will be interesting to see if these stay successful when the novelty wears off but I have to admit, they seem to be on to something for the time being.