pasithea

Pitch: If there is one thing more important to people than their own security, it is their neighbor's opinion of them. This Halloween, make your neighborhood safe for fun again with Candy ID. Candy ID combines the simplicity of a price gun with the security of online registration. Simply load our website, enter your personalized greeting and place a sheet of Candy ID stickers into your printer, and print a secure, unique identifer AND personal greeting, then tear at the perforations, load into the labeler and in minutes, your Halloween ghouls and goblins will have nothing to fear AND your neighbors will know how much you care! Candy ID is the perfect way to make the holidays safe and fun again.

The cheap crapola to sell to the cattle of america:

A clip-loaded price gun than instead of holding a roll holds several strips of price stickers.
Printer-friendly sheets of orange stickers with column perforations to be torn apart and loaded into the gun, maybe a laser-cut pumpkin or ghost for authenticity if cost-effective.
Free Web Service which does the following:
- Allows user to register, traces route, stores all user information, accepts some kind of product key from the ID sticker box.
- Allows user to add some stupid personal greeting, maybe some small halloweeny graphic
- Outputs some kind of encrypted barcode or number onto the tags along with greeting.
- A seperate key recognition service that allows the paranoid parent to look up the ID on any piece of candy and get info on who generated the tag, when, and where, to verify that Bob and Martha's candy actually came from Bob and Martha.

The real stuff:
Since printers have a unique fingerprint, and the ID string would be unique, and (if cost effective) a laser-cut would be a good authenticator as well and so would be the web-user's routing information and REMOTE_ADDR, stupid as this idea sounds, it would actually work pretty well. The biggest worry would be stickers coming off in the kid's candy bag and that's probably not such a huge worry as there would probably be unlabeled candies anyhow.

Problems:

Price: Looking good to your neighbors is important to americans but most americans won't want to pay a lot for it. I'm guessing that for most americans the safety of their neighbors' children is worth ten dollars at most, maybe twenty in affluent areas. You might be able to get by with $5 refills on the sticker sets. I think this is probably an achievable goal. a 1/2"x 1/2" sticker could generate 160 stickers per page of printer paper. So probably 1 or 2
print sheets would probably do it for most households, and a very basic plastic labeler gun could be made well within that price range. The real money to be made is in the paranoid parent lookup program.
Manufacturing: This obviously isn't a garage business. You need fabricating machines and sweat shop labor for mass produced crapola of this caliber. It would best be aimed at some company with Avery or Mead or any company that produces paper products, seasonal crapola, and shoddy plastic merchandise.
Distribution: A product like this needs real corporate whoring to work. Walmart is really the only way to go. Get the company handling manufacturing to handle distribution.
Liability: Some idiot will find a way to misuse this thing and try to sue you. Just hide liability concerns in your Terms of Use for web registration of paranoid parent lookup. No one reads these things anyhow. A lawyer will be needed for this part, of course.
Code: Okay, the code is pretty straight forward but the encryption scheme and database would need to be somewhat secure. Also, the server to handle load could be rather heavy. The manufacturing list could use the user registry for advertising of other products though, so it would probably pay for itself.

So there you go. Million dollar idea de'jure. I'll use Livejournal's timestamp of this entry as my proof of my concept date. If anyone uses this idea, I want 0.1% of the gross annual profits from these and derrivitive products in royalties, or a one-time buyout of all rights to this idea for $500,000. Feel free to clean up my rather derogatory concept and send it in to soulless corporate scum that will eat it up and slap each other on the back for thinking of it. Better yet, save yourself. There's a dark and ugly part of my brain that was bred to be a mindless money-grubbing drone that generates these ideas. Best to keep such taint out of yourself if you can.