Intelligent Cart Brings Jetsons-Style Shopping (
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Can you envision a tablet-equipped shopping cart that already knows your list, presents tailored discounts and charges your credit card when you place items inside? Such technologies are already in limited testing.
Envision opening a refrigerator, making a tuna-fish sandwich and using the last of the mayonnaise. You scan the empty jar on the freezer door for two seconds and then recycle the sticky jar.
Three days later, you walk into your local grocery store and grab a cart, which displays a list of everything you need. Some of the items came from a list you e-mailed to your store, others are things the cart thinks youre probably out of (you havent purchased milk in two weeks and your last portion had an expiration date of eight days ago), and some are things that your refrigerator told your shopping cart about.
Your cart uses a navigation system to literally direct you to your items, flashing ads along the way based on your particular buying pattern. If you buy two tubes of toothpaste, it can decide to give you a special discount on the third right there, an offer it will not make to the next customer because you have its intended three-child household.
What is the true ROI for Retail Self-Checkout? Click here to read more.
You look on your list and see that a family member wants a particular flavor of a specific brand of canned soup. The cart takes you to the relevant part of that aisle, but all you see is a sea of cans stacked 30 deep. The flavor you seek is either buried deep behind the front can or it isnt there.
You dont have to start shifting cans. The tablet in the cart checks inventory and reports that the store has sold out of that flavor. Or perhaps it reports that there is only one can left, and by moving the tablet by the cans, it points to the correct row and indicates that it is 11 cans back.
As you put in another can of soup for yourself, the tablet beeps and alerts you that it is high-sodium and it knows youre on a low-sodium diet. The tablet also knows of your sons peanut allergy and will similarly flag any items you purchase that have peanuts anywhere on its ingredient list.
Youre about to head out when the tablet beeps again, this time to tell you that your one pound of thinly sliced roast beef is ready at the deli counter. When you arrived at the store, the tablet beamed the order to them directly while you shopped, and then they beamed a message back when it was finished.
Theres no need for a checkout lane for you, as the cart charges your credit card for each item the instant you place it in the cart. Dont worry if the produce isnt barcoded, as an IBM device scan reviews color, texture and possibly smell to distinguish between a Granny Smith and a Golden Delicious apple or between a plantain and a banana.
Most of the technology just described is not hypothetical or prototype-only. Its deployed somewhere in the retail world today, mostly in limited test mode. The other items are ready to be deployed in the next rev of various vendors self-checkout products.
Specialty food maker Bruce Foods is about to go live with phase one in a far-reaching rollout of RedPrairies supply chain software. Click here to read more.
Some concepts that are on the purely theoretical level include inch-by-inch cart tracking, so that retailers could learn which shoppers paused at which displays and then took which action. How many people looked at certain products, read their labels and then put them back?
The systems security method is less restrictive than the nonmobile self-checkout method, which is why its supplemented by periodic, full-cart re-scans.
Dusty Lutz, product manager for NCR FastLane by NCR Corp., said he has concerns about how consumers will feel about those security audits. "Thats a pretty punitive security system," he said, pointing to the randomness and that the entire cart needs to be emptied and re-scanned.
Next Page: The "Holy Grail" of full-item RFID tagging.
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