Some Ideas

How about open source calendaring? I'm sure it's out there. You could sign up to have events from vendors you select pop up as suggestions on your calendar. You could even have affinity algorithms like they use at Amazon learn about you and suggests events based on prior purchases. Not send things to your inbox, but pencil it on your calendar as a possibility. Click thru to order tickets, select seats, etc.

How bout this: on top of the play areas they currently have for small children, grocery stores should add reading rooms for older kids with comfy chairs where they can take their books.

This last thing is the kind of amenity we're unlikely to see in the recession which is either underway or imminent, though there will be plenty of fallow real estate available for this or other uses.

Which actually leads me to another thought: it's time to start dreaming out what new's gonna come out of this recession. The tech bubble, for example, left a huge overhang of excess telecoms capacity, has that been worked off? Nobody writes about it anymore. And the recession itself begat not only cheap money and the housing bubble but also a really vibrant web with real business models and 2.0 too.

If we don't want to put our hispanic workforce in all the excess housing that nobody wants to pay for, why don't we repurpose much of it from residential to retail so that there will be a store in every neighborhood and people won't have to drive so far to get milk? And we could also use some of those houses to grow high end killer pot, which we could then export to offset the current account deficit. Don't let nobody tell you there are no options.