Pretty much the title. Like, get those handheld scanners and attach them to the carts. I scan items as I put them in, roll up to a “register” where the cart is weighed and verified by a cashier. I just hand over the cash then leave. Or even better, install load sensors in the cart.
Usually I like to pack my groceries into my boxes as I get them into the cart. Keeps things orderly and neat and I also don’t buy more than I can carry home. But this means I have to unpack them to place on the belt then pack them all over again after paying. It would be kinda nice to just pay by the cart load.
Walmart spent millions on rfid trying to do this. Howevera cart full of razor blades would always not read something so they gave up.
as others have said what you ask for evists - but only where most people are honest enough to not cheat. Where stores don’t trust everyone the cost of verification is more than any savings.
Sam’s Club, owned by Walmart, does this basically.
You scan items with your phone, check out, then walk under this arch camera things to leave, I haven’t been stopped to be manually checked in ages.
Sams club attracts different customers from WalMart and so they don’t have the same crime concerns.
Walmart spent millions on rfid trying to do this. Howevera cart full of razor blades would always not read something so they gave up.
My point was Walmart, Sam’s parent company, spent millions and carried it out in their other store. I don’t know if it’s rfid, but I’m sure their research in it overlapped with the way they implemented it in Sam’s.
We have that in one shop. It started with just a scanner and at the register you’d get random searches. By now the scale is integrated into the cart.
It sucks a bit because with the first system you could quickly scan ten items and throw them into the cart. But now you have to wait a bit after throwing something into the cart for the scale to give the ok.
They don’t weigh at the end because that way you can have your shopping bags or boxes in the cart. That way the cart’s weight at the beginning is registered as 0 and when you’re done shopping you just have to lift your bags directly from the cart into your car. I guess that could be mitigated by having a scale at the entrance of the shop.
But for all the waiting after scanning one item it’s still much nicer than having to load everything from the cart to the register and then back into the cart again.
Yeah, seen something like this in the UK. You take a scanner and scan everything as you shop, then just lay the bill as you exit. To begin with they even offered a discount I think. But they didn’t have a weigh option, just that they’d check some carts ‘at random’. My understanding was, like self checkouts, even if there’s a little more theft it’s more than made up for by less workers.
In Switzerland big super markets have this with handscanners. You can also use the Supermarkt App and scan the stuff with your smartphone. When you leave you just checkout and payment is processed automatically if you have set it up or you can pay at a terminal. Sometimes they do random checks.
Same in Belgium, no scale involved, just a handled scanner you bring in the shop. At checkout you give (or put back depending on the supermarket) the scanner, then an algorithm tell you if you’re elected to a partial control (in which case a cashier scan some of the articles, again there are some rules depending on the brand of supermarket - some ask rescan 5 random products, some 10, some explicitly list most valuable items, some require the cashier to count items,…). I say an algorithm because experience show it’s not just random (for example in the supermarket brand I most often go, if you cancel an item on the scanner, you’re 100% sure to have a control).
Grabbing a scanner at the door makes more sense otherwise they would have to be made waterproof since people take and leave their carts outside.
I worked for a company that did a demo using RFID tags. Every item had one and you just walk through a scanner when you’re done shopping and it rings everything up instantly.
I do this with my phone at meijer. No need for a device when you’re phone can scan already.
Some giants have had handheld scanners for a decade… You just grab one as you walk in, scan and pack everything and hand it to the cashier on way out.
And you need a membership card because of course you do
Also why involve a cashier when self-checkout is available?
amazon fresh stores do something like this.
Already exists and being used, search for “smart shopping carts”
Tesco in the uk does this.
Coincidentally enough this post a few down from yours (on my feed) shows a trial for the second part of your post
I think other large supermarkets do too.
Stop & Shop in the US does this (or at least it did? I never used it so I barely pay attention to it lol). There’s like a wall of handheld scanners you can pick up when you enter and a little place on the cart for them to go in. You can scan and bag your stuff as you go and then pay at a special register.
They definitely still do it at both locations in my town. I shop for one, so I’ve never felt the need to try it out, but I see other people using them regularly.
Ikea does this with their app, but generally, you go to ikea to get one or two items, so it doesn’t really speed up the proccess of checking out
Honor system wouldn’t work in all places unfortunately
At least in Germany, at a lot of Rewes (supermarket chain), this is absolutely a thing and very common. You can place the handheld barcode scanners in a specialised holder on the cart handle and then scan as you go, and neatly package all your stuff before going to the checkout and paying at a terminal. If even Germany has got this by now, then every other country on the planet surely does too lol.
Our Edeka has a system like that too.
So does Kaufland and Albert in the Czech Republic
Do they make it easy to put something back if you change your mind?
Yup, you can just edit the amount of items you scanned. Also makes it easier to “scan” an item in bulk.
They dont check the cart weight, instead they just randomly pick out people where they go through their scanned items and check that nothing else is in the cart. I’m being checked about once every 20 times I go.
That all sounds awesome. We definitely don’t have that in NW US yet. Hope we get it eventually.
We’ll, there’s Amazon go, which is actually slightly better than having to scan and check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go#:~:text=Amazon Go is a chain of convenience,Kingdom%2C operated by the online retailer Amazon.
Also Kroger did what you are recommending like 10 years ago, but it looked silly compared to Amazon go, so it didn’t really stick in my area.
