With India under lockdown for 21 days to prevent the spread of coronavirus people are finding it extremely difficult to procure daily essentials such as groceries, medicines, among others. Grocery stores across the country have changed their timings and given people are stocking food to avoid stepping out of home every day most essential products are out-of-stock most of the time. To help people get real-time updates from these stores and the availability of the essential products Capital Float, the company that acquired the Walnut finance management app in 2018, introduced a new feature in the app called “Find a store near you”. The app is available on Google Play store and App store. ALSO READ: This website shows nearest open grocery shop, medical store, COVID-19 test centres Previously, we reported about Quickr adding a similar feature to its app with the aim to help people find the nearby open grocery stores, medical clinics, and also COVID-19 testing centers. Google Maps has also added a similar feature to its app for Android as well as iOS. The "groceries" feature lets users find out the nearest functional store(s). Google has also added options such as: Chemists, takeaways, delivery and more. As the name suggests the "Find a store nearby" feature aims to help people who have been struggling to find essentials near them such as groceries and medicines as well as open gas stations during this lockdown period. The idea of introducing this feature was derived from Find the nearest ATM that Walnut built at the time of demonetisation. During demonitisation people suffered cash crunch and with Find the ATM feature the company helped people locate an ATM with cash loaded in it given most ATMs were out of cash at that point. READ: Google Maps, Search and Assistant to now show locations of COVID-19 food, night shelters in India Find a store nearby is a real-time tracker that informs a user about all the essentials stores that are open in their area along with an indication of what types of items are available there. With this feature the company is trying to track the availability of common essential items such as milk, eggs, bread, diabetic medicines, etc.
