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.

It’s sometimes hard to find enough workers to get the job done in the 2-3 night time-frame that the mall asks for. I usually help out on Christmas Tree night, since it’s important to get the whole tree put together in one night. My brother Ned and my friend Mike also worked.

The steel frame of the tree is stored out in a shed in the mall’s parking garage. There are also huge decorative chandeliers that go in the air around it, and we had to move them out of the way to get the tree out first. They don’t look like chandeliers until they’re assembled.

We have to bring the fake tree limbs and the decorations down from the roof in hampers. There’s a service elevator on the food court loading dock behind the giant grease dumpster that goes up to the top floor. The elevator is very slow.

A second elevator goes from the top floor up to the roof. The tree accessories are stored in an airplane-hanger type of shed.

The limbs were piled relatively neatly in the corner this year. The mall stores all kinds of random stuff in this shed, including their Easter decorations.

From the roof you can see down into the mall. By 11 PM the upper floors are quiet, although people are still walking through the food court, from the Metro station to the parking garage.

Once everything is inside, it’s time to start assembling. We had two other guys helping out, nephews of our contact person at the mall. The tree is made out of steel rings, and the bottom rings are bolted together from four pieces.

After the 3rd ring goes on, you have to climb the tree to work on it. The ladder in the middle will stay there through Christmas in case something goes wrong with the lights at the top, and because it’s impossible to remove.

The rungs of the tree bolt together at 3-5 points, depending on the size of the rung. It’s important to get everything bolted down, since you’ll be standing on the rung you just worked on in a few minutes. We put several heavy-duty cable ties around each rung as safeties.

My brother is less afraid of heights than I am. One of the the plates for bolting the rungs together was missing, so he put a C-clamp on it. The wide base of the tree makes it very stable, and there’s not much actual danger unless you slip. No one ever slips.

Once all the rungs are in place, we move the tree over to the first floor balcony above Texas BBQ, (which used to be Frank & Stein, I think). This allows us to work on the top of the tree from the balcony, although for certain parts it’s still necessary to stand on the tree. I put the top on by myself this year. Maybe I’m getting better about heights.

My dad wanted to double-check that every single bulb on the top of the tree was still working after it was connected. This meant balancing on the railing and holding onto the tree with one hand.

We tried to get him to let us rotate the tree so he could check the other side more easily, but he didn’t want to do that. In previous years we would also hang a hundred golden angels from the crossbeams above the food court, and he would sometimes climb out on the beams to bring things to the up riggers.

There are lots of bulbs to be checked. In addition to the electric branches, we decorate the tree with fake sprigs of fruit and red and gold ornaments.

By 3 AM we had the top of the tree done, as well as a little bit of one side. Typically we work from the top down, row by row, to leave a clear path. But since only one or two people can work at the top, it makes sense to start decorating one side at the same time.

Checking the bulbs on the branches is prickly business. The bulbs go bad easily, so hardly any branches have all their bulbs working. This year we went through 15-20 new boxes of bulbs, with 25 bulbs per box.

By 4 AM we had half the height of the tree decorated. The lower rungs need successively more branches and ornaments, but the work gets easier because you’re lower to the ground. Each branch has to be plugged in to a ring of power outlets on the frame. I stayed up in the tree plugging and hanging, while my brother carried branches and bags of ornaments up to me.

Occasionally I had to get some stuff from the hampers we left in the back corridor behind the mall management office. The hallways back there are a little spooky at night.

By 5 AM we had a few more rungs decorated, and it was time to wrap up for the night. I had hoped we’d be able to finish it completely in one night, but we had spent a lot of time making sure everything was straight. If the branches are still compressed or twisted from storage, the tree looks crooked. We put the remaining branches on to hide the frame.

The finished product looks pretty elegant. The whole package includes chandeliers and glowing stars hung from the ceiling. After the two-month-long holiday season, the mall will want us to remove the decorations even more quickly than we put them up, probably on the 26th or 27th of December.