Grocery Retail Online: For shoppers in thousands of stores worldwide, the ability to scan, bag and pay for items has become synonymous with NCR's FastLane — today's version of the self-checkout solution that NCR Corp.introduced 10 years ago. Though the concept of self-checkout had been toyed with since the late 1980s, it was 1998 when Ball's Food Stores, based in Kansas City, Kan., first installed NCR's self-checkout solution.