For those of you who’ve followed me for a while, you know that I like to geek out over new and exciting technology. I am utterly obsessed with anything that can help people organize their digital lives better. Now I know what you’re thinking; “Dude….You’re about to talk to me about shopping carts….really?” but bear with me on this one. I started going to this one particular store near me that had them, and my wife and I tried them out and have become obsessed with them. You might think that there might not be a way that you could improve the technology for Shopping carts, but now that it’s done, it’s both deceptively simple and easy to use. When you went grocery shopping before, you would go through the aisles throwing things into your cart as you happen to come by them. You’d probably organize what was in the cart when you got to the checkout. The system that Sobey’s has now is so much better.
1) How they work – It’s actually a brilliantly simple system. All of these carts have a scanner and a place to hang your bags inside of the cart itself. You scan the item, give it a second to recognize and add it to your bill, and then you can carry on. If there is an item measured by weight (like a bunch of Bananas as an example), you put them on the scanner. When you’re done shopping, you pay at the actual shopping cart (which has a chip and pin machine) and carry out all your groceries. It’s that simple.
2) Why they’re good – Where before putting things in your cart as you came by them was good enough, now you can actually organize and bag them as you go. It’s great because before, we would all have to take more time managing our stuff at the end of the shopping experience; we can now organize the bags. This makes for a much more efficient trip. It also makes it so that you can put similar things together for the people who like to organize their groceries (like me) while you are shopping. I also like the fact that the pay station is on the cart itself. This makes it so that you don’t have to wait in line to pay. the Experience that my Wife and I have had is that we fill up our cart with whatever groceries we needed, and when we were done, we would take care of the payment right then and there.
3) Why this tech is important – A few years ago, Amazon came out with AmazonGO, which was supposed to be the shopping experience of the future. People could come into the store, pick up whatever they wanted, and it would automatically charge their Amazon account when they left. No bagging, no scanning, no nothing. Just come in, pick up the things and walk out.
4) Some downsides – I will admit that there are a couple of downsides. The primary issue that I have come across is that you cannot move the cart when you scan an item. If you move the cart in any way while the system is processing what you’ve scanned, it requests that you don’t jostle the thing while it’s scanning. This does mean that you have to stay still for a couple of seconds at most while the item scans, but it usually scans and adds to your cart reasonably quickly. I can only assume that the reason it’s doing this is that it’s trying to get the weight of the item correct, and moving the cart will mess with the sensors. Considering how much time we spend offloading, scanning and bagging our things at the end of the shopping trip, this is a minor issue and could likely be resolved in the future.
There is something about the improvement of how we do things in our day-to-day lives that appeals to me. For years I have been thinking about getting paper receipts when you go shopping was something that I would much prefer to get e-mailed than having a weirdly long piece of paper that I have to figure out what to do with. I’ll be honest, I even tried scanning some of my Grocery receipts, but some were so long that I would have to cut them so that the scanner wouldn’t time out while in the middle of scanning. Now that I can get my receipts through e-mail, it’s so much easier. It’s the little changes like this that make it so that our digital infrastructure really help people stay organized within their digital systems
How would you have your receipts?
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