A few years ago – about four, in fact – I was a “student” (did you know that “taliban” means “student”?) in an entrepreneurship program and wanted to write a business plan that proposed using scanners for supermarket shopping.
The leader of the course – an arrogant Babson college MBA with a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood (he had a gigantic sign, “No Irish Need Apply” in the office of his $700,000 home and wrote the final presentation for a guy he favored, meanwhile throwing the rest of us under the bus) – said it was a stupid idea and I should drop it.
Well, our local Stop & Shop here in the boonies has just introduced scanner shopping.
Apparantly unbeknownst to the know-it-all MBA, Stop & Shop has been experimenting with consumer scanning devices since 2003, when they piloted the Shopping Buddy in a few stores. The Shopping Buddy was a pricey portable computer mounted on a shopping cart.
The Mashpee store uses hand-held Symbol scanners with memory and an easy-to-read display. At the store entrance, you scan your Stop & Shop card and are assigned a unit.
As you shop, you scan in your items, and the device keeps a running total of your bill plus your savings. It also displays unadvertised discounts based on your past shopping habits.
You bag your items as you go, and the system also lets you easily delete any item you want to put back.
Produce is about the only department in the store that isn’t barcoded, but they figured that out, too, by installing a scale and a printer in the produce department.
When you get to the checkout – either staffed or self-serve – you scan the reader once more, and your order is automatically downloaded to the register.
It was a lot of fun, and only one thing about the experience vexed me: as I was in one of the aisles, I heard the beep of another scanner. When I turned around, it was a thirty-something, techie-looking male. Son of a B!
I had some trouble with the scanner at the checkout; they said a few were a little quirky, but it eventually downloaded my order.
On the way out, I told the person at the scanner display that it would be very cool if the unit could beep on the aisles that contained the merchandise with the personalized discounts.
She said that they were probably working on it and I have no doubt that she was right.