Free as in Pizza

I don’t need to go to Epcot Center ever again. I’ll just go to the grocery store instead.

When I walked into the Virginia Square Giant supermarket this evening, there was a guy waiting by the entrance to introduce me to their new way of shopping for food: Handheld scanners that you carry with you in the store, checking out items as you go. He did a pretty good job with his pitch, but he didn’t really have to sell me on it. I think I fit squarely in their Early Adopter demographic.

These things are pretty sweet gadgets:

The concept is simple: You put in your phone number or “bonus card” number at a kiosk, and it activates a barcode scanner for you. Then you trot through the store scanning items as you put them in your basket.

You can do all the CRUD operations that you expect to be able to do, such as removing an item from your cart by selecting “Remove” and re-scanning it to confirm.

If you come across something with no barcode, like fresh produce, they’ve installed some electronic scales that can weigh the item and print a custom barcode for it. I wasn’t too worried about that anyway, since I don’t eat vegetables.

The scanner works well, at least compared to the barcode scanners I had to troubleshoot when I worked for Fairfax County Public Libraries many years ago. Time will tell how it fares against the barcodes on crappy product packaging (stretchable plastics, for example). It rang up my “Giant All Purpose Flour” as “Stop & Shop All Purpose Flour”—a little window into black box of our national food chain.

Part of the implicit contract that you accept by using one of these scanners is that it will periodically make a “Cha-Ching” sound and display a coupon on the screen. The idea is clearly to motivate impulse buying by suggesting enticing deals that the shopper might otherwise have passed up. All the offers I got were in coupon form. I’m both a coupon clipper and staunchly anti-impulse buying, so this aspect of the experience made me a little tense.

I would imagine that the people who wrote the software have big plans for future versions. The store now has access to a complete record of your shopping history—not only what you bought, but also what you almost bought and reconsidered.

However, that means you get to have a handy list of what you’re about to buy, with a running total of how much you’ll be spending. Owing to the kinds of foods I like to eat, I’m far from being a frugal grocery shopper. But having an itemized price list does help me think more clearly about wants versus needs.

Today I fulfilled two needs and two wants (both planned, rah rah), and that was a reasonable balance for my weekly food budget.

Of course, the real payoff comes at the register. Wasting one’s life in the grocery store is one of the most poignant existential dilemmas we face. By the time you get the queue, you’re really done and ready to get the hell out. Tonight, the combination of self-checkout and the new scanner workflow (scan in, confirm, pay, bag) got me out in about a minute. YMMV.

Overall, I was impressed. It felt more like playing than shopping, which is precisely the game they’re running, I’m sure.

A few other folks have written about the scan-as-you-go experience:

• Josh Greene notes his first impressions, with a few interesting points in the comments.
• Dave Fine conducts a point-based feature evaluation, FAILing it by one point (or maybe two, depending on how many zeroes his number system has) on some metrics I didn’t consider.
• Hiawatha Bray gives a full rundown of the Scan It system at Stop & Shop in Boston, in a review much more thorough (though in some places puffier) than this one.
• IBM has a marketing whitepaper on the grocery store’s motivation for doing this. I believe this paper refers to an earlier incarnation of the program referenced in Bray’s article.

tagged arlington, clarendon, consumerism, food, shopping, technology