All too often I have gone to a store to buy one of my favourite products, only to find that it has been discontinued. This can be particularly annoying in the case of hard-to-fit clothing items or cosmetics of The Perfect Colour. As a service to their loyal customers, companies should offer a service where you can go to their website and "subscribe" to a product. You just fill out a form that automatically tells a web server that this product is one of your favourites, and if the company is ever thinking of discontinuing a product, the server can automatically send out an email to all the subscribers informing them of this. That way the customers can go out and stock up before it's too late, and the company (or maybe the store, I'm not entirely sure how this works) can make some extra money by sending out this information before the stores reduce the item to a clearance price. I know I would certainly buy multiple copies of, say, my favourite concealer or bra at the full price if it were about to be discontinued, and people who didn't need it quite so badly could buy the last few items left after they go on clearance.
If it is true that discontinued items are those that don't sell so well (as opposed to companies discontinuing stuff just to piss us off), then this system shouldn't present too much of a problem because there won't be that many people running out to stock up before the item is discontinued. This system could also help companies and consumers in other ways, for example by showing companies just how many people are loyally devoted to a particular product (as opposed to those who buy it once then find out the colour doesn't work for them), or by sending out a notification to customers when a particular store in their area is having one of their favourite products on sale. I'm sure it would also provide some kind of valuable demographic information, since companies are always using air miles and stuff to see what products I'm buying where and when.
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