At the same time economic development leaders are seeing scores of Lawrence commuters as a growing problem, one Lawrence couple sees them as an opportunity for their new business.

Franklin Jones and Rhonda Dolan this week will be launching Shopperhoppers, a new business that focuses on buying and delivering groceries and other goods for Lawrence residents who either don’t have the time or desire to do it themselves.

And in a town where a recent survey found 22 percent of all workers were commuting outside the city to work, the couple believes commuters will be a perfect target market for their services.

“Lots of the city fathers don’t like to admit it, but Lawrence is a bedroom community,” Jones said. “Lots of people drive to Topeka or Kansas City every day, and we really think they’ll take to this service. Plus, everybody we talk to hates to shop.”

The couple’s business plan is simple. They’ll use their two vans and a light green Volkswagen bug to travel to basically any store in Lawrence to pick up any item that any Lawrence resident needs. Customers will pay the company the price of the goods plus a delivery fee ranging from 10 percent to 20 percent of the purchase price, depending on how quickly they want the company to make the delivery.

Jones said the company will deliver anything from an “egg to a piano,” but the couple expects grocery items to be the company’s bread and butter, with customers submitting their detailed grocery list via fax, telephone or the Internet.

“But we’re hoping that while we’re out doing their grocery shopping, they’ll have us do a lot of their other errands too,” Dolan said  errands like picking up dry cleaning, taking mail to the post office, or even grabbing a meal for the family at a fast-food restaurant.

Or in other words, all those things that Jones never seemed to have time to do when he was commuting daily to Kansas City as a systems technician for Southwestern Bell.

“I used to work a lot of overtime and found that there was never time to do the errands and still have some time to spend with the family,” Jones said. “That’s sort of how we got the idea for this.”

Jones and Dolan are hoping that the combination of groceries, miscellaneous errands, along with some delivery services they’ll offer to small businesses, will be enough to generate $1.5 million in revenue by the company’s second year in business.

“We’re hoping to get to the point of doing about 40 deliveries per day,” Jones said.

Currently the business’s two owners are its only employees, and the company is operating out of their southwest Lawrence home.

The couple has been researching the business opportunity for about two years and said shopping services that specialize in grocery items or online grocery sites are becoming popular on the coasts.

But finding such a service in a midwestern city the size of Lawrence is rare. Dolan said in her research she found a similar business in Boulder, Colo., but it limits itself to groceries, dry cleaning and movie rentals.

“We can’t find anybody that does everything, so we’re hoping that is what will set us apart,” Dolan said.