This weekend, we tried one of those “personal shopping assistants” found in fancy supermarkets. In this case, the Giant Eagle “Market District” in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood. The concept is that one walks around with a beeper, beeping and bagging as-you-go. At the checkout, all that’s left to do is beep the barcode on it, approve the transaction, and get lost. Conclusions:
• The hardware works fine, beep-wise.
• It lost its wireless connection with whatever server keeps track of purchases, locking it up temporarily.
• Not everything was in its database, forcing us to check them out at the end manually.
• Vague feeling that one is working for supermarket free of charge.
• It still saved a lot of time, even with issues.
Or… you could just go to the store and buy what you need.
i use this every time i shop at giant eagle. it’s very handy for the times that you only have 12.43 to spend.
sometimes, when you go to check out it tells you someone has to come over and they grab a few things out of your cart to scan, just to make sure you’ve scanned them.
mildly annoying, but i’ve found it only happens when you spend upwards of 40$. at least those are the only times it has happened to me.
I love it, namely because it represents an order of magnitude increase in shopping efficiency.
See, you stash your reuseable bags in the shopping cart, bag your groceries to your preference, as you’re pulling them off the shelves and scanning them, et viola, by the time you get to the checkout, everything (mostly) is pretty much bagged and ready to go. It’s leveraging the scan-as-you-go tech with reuseable bag tech that the scheme really pays off inefficiency dividends.
It doesn’t make me feel like a store employee, but more like this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WV3_jYB5HU
The self checkout lines tend to give the employee feeling, but not so much at the Ikea.
bkd
@1, this is going to the store and buying what you need. It’s also saving a lot of unnecessary time at the checkout. It’s also brilliant. I started using these when a Bloom came in nearby, and got excited when Giant Eagle started doing it too. It really is convenient.
Can someone explain a bit more in detail exactly how that works (work flow wise) and where it cuts the time? I am still a bit baffled … is it that you scan the barcodes of all the stuff you put in your cart and then just hand the scanny thing to the register person ?
Need to try that next time i am in the US .. sounds interesting
We had these in the UK years and years ago, I dont see them around anywhere anymore. My local, not very large supermarket had them, but I couldnt tell you why they got rid of them. Maybe they weren’t cost effective, it didn’t seem many people ever used them.
We still have these, Harpdevil. They’re used exclusively by Sainsburys, as far as I’m aware, in the larger stores – small, local ‘express’ Sainsburys don’t have them, probably because in that case you’ll only be carrying a basketful anyway, so time saved would be minimal.
The main saving on time is at the checkout. It’s not directly because the tillperson doesn’t have to spend time scanning all your items, as you still have to scan them which eats up a little time by itself; rather, it’s because Sainsburys has tills where they’ll only accept people using the fast-track scanners. Like tills for people with ten items or fewer.
Part of it’s probably psychological; few people outright enjoy waiting in a queue. Three people with scanners DO pass through a checkout quicker than just two without, though.
As for the failure rate… yeah, that was pretty high when they first started using the gadgets, and for about a year afterwards; bread would never work even if you could get the scanner to work on the barcode labels, and for a period of about three months no packet of pasta scanned without throwing an error, either.
However, it’s rare that there are any problem items, now; they improved the system with time, even working out how to let users scan discounted or reduced price items.
We used to use those things all the time in the Sainsburys up the road from our house in Belfast, until we moved. I have to say, I kind of miss them – especially when we’re stuck behind really slow people in the queue.
Although occasionally Sainsbury would call you for a “rescan”, where you’d have to unpack and repack everything to make sure you weren’t trying to steal anything.
Not just Sainsbury in the UK, Waitrose have self-scan in their stores too.
In The Netherlands a couple of Albert Heijn supermarkets have these, including one I occasionally use.
I like it a lot, it saves time at the checkout because you simply return the bleeper, pay and leave. In my supermarket you do that unattended, so I expect to have some fraude going on. You’re supposed to be checked randomly, but I must have used the system some 20 times now and I have NEVER been checked. I guess the savings the supermarket makes with less checkout-personnel evens out the stolen goods.
BTW: I don’t steal.
Ha .. and here in Italy they are still so afraid of stealing that they seal your carry on bags in plastic .. which means you cannot carry your backpack on your back anymore … sigh …
Here in the Boston area, we’ve have these for about the last year at the local Stop&Shop grocery chain.
My wife and I find them very convenient, especially when shopping with small children in two, as we almost always do.
Being able to literally run right though the check-out, rather than having to wait for someone to scan and bag your groceries, when the kids are getting itchy and grabbing at candybars and such, is really a great thing.
Or you could make grocery store’s redundant and shop on a website, then get it delivered to your kitchen. Costs the same, stuff is fresh and hasn’t been groped 666 times by random smelly people in the store and you eliminate the need for the grocery store with it’s rather wasteful open fridge-shelves and such. I switched to shopping online with Ocado a few months ago and I don’t miss the grocery store experience one bit.
This has been around since the store opened several years ago. Never got around to trying it though. However we have made a habit of using the self checkout. With two people you can scan and bag groceries faster than most employees and you’ll have a fairly good idea of where everything is. The real downside is that if you use a couponfor $2 or more then an employee has to come and approve it.
I’ve also used these at a Pittsburgh Giant Eagle (the one near South Hills Village Mall). Small world.
It’s a pretty neat idea, but I found it a little bit cumbersome when I was shopping by myself. It was a little awkward to negotiate the cart, the items I was buying, the scanner, and bags, all on the go.
With two people, however – which is generally how I shop anyhow – it’s absolutely fantastic. One person steers and bags, another person grabs and scans, and you’re out the door in no time. Very clever system that I think (hope) will catch on.
The grocery store down the street from me had those for about a year, then abandoned them. I suspect that theft was just part of the reason. The other was that their high-tech produce scales kept breaking. They went cheap on them and there was always a line for the one working scale that would print out bar codes.
The concept was great when everything worked.
Whoa whoa whoa. That sounds pretty cool. When everything has RFID in it, then it will probably autoscan when you put it in the cart. Did you have to buy the scanner, or do you just borrow it from the store? Why not build the scanner directly into the cart, or make a snap on module? This might be troublesome if you have to hold it all the time.
I’ll keep an eye out for this little bugger the next time I’m at Geagle.
Also Anonymous’s video led me to watch a number of these RFID grocery shopping videos and I noticed a very interesting similarity between them all. All the concept videos still use a paper receipt!!! Why would you ever want a paper receipt with a system that automatically scans all your items and bills you? Can’t it show up on a screen for in-store verification and email you?
These are a godsend when you have a young child. We never bothered with the system until junior came along – easily cuts out five minutes (more if it’s busy). We’ve only had one or two items ever that failed to scan, one of them being a carton of eggs with the barcode not printed very well on the recycled pulp.
The time savings as stated by other people are:
- if you’ve got your eco-bags (or cardboard boxes as is the case for our local), you pack as you go
- don’t need to unload the trolley at the checkout
- don’t need to have everything scanned (unless you get pulled up for a random rescan)
- don’t need to reload the trolley
- if you’ve packed as you go, it’s seconds to load your car, instead of minutes
By the way, a beeper is a pager. I was confused why the grocery store would need to page you personally. Then I realized what you really ment was a personal barcode scanner.
These are marvelous with young kids. The key is that checkout is nearly constant time, roughly 2 minutes from deciding to leave to out the door. So if your two year old twins decided to throw a fit, out you go.
For people asking where the time savings is – there is zero savings (and even additional cost) since you scan things as you pick them up, rather than at checkout. But you place them directly into your bags, rather than needing them rebagged when you leaved. Especially if there isn’t anyone bagging besides the cashier, that saves a lot of time. In addition, besides the occasional audit, checkout is scan 2 bar codes, and then run your credit card through, which is very fast.
That’s my Geagle! I love the scanners for big grocery trips, and especially when I’ve remembered to bring my reusable bags with me (I’m getting better about it, I promise). I have never had any difficulties in using them. My favorite part about using them is that it keeps a running total of everything in my cart, and as a student on a budget this is very helpful!