News

Smart shopping carts on the horizon

January 14, 2004

HAWTHORNE, N.Y. -- Imagine your shopping cart suggesting a bottle of wine (and its location in the store) that will go perfectly with the salmon you just picked up, or telling you that you haven't bought toilet paper in four weeks. The smart shopping cart is coming soon to a grocery near you.

According to an article on MSNBC.com, researchers at IBM recently assembled several of its high-tech machines for a demonstration at their Industry Solutions Lab in Hawthorne.

Some are being tested in stores while others are in various stages of development. Other companies including NCR, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard are also working on similar products, sometimes in partnerships, according to the article.

"We'll see more change in the next five years in the way people shop than in the last 20," said Dan Hopping, a consulting manager with IBM who specializes in store operations and merchandising.

Kate Delhagen, a retail analyst with Forrester Research in Atlanta, said that until now, most shoppers have seen high-tech applications only at the checkout counter, with its credit card swiper and bar-code scanner.

"But now, the number of applications is multiplying and consumers are becoming more familiar with computer interfaces. So there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of gadgets and gizmos, a lot of high-tech things happening in a lot of different stores."

Many of the applications can be used in any retail setting, but grocers especially are "under tremendous pressure right now to create a better in-store experience for their customers or they're going to lose them on price to Wal-Mart," she said in the article.

The smart shopping cart looks like a normal one except for an interactive screen and scanner mounted near the shopper. Once the shopper swipes his store card, his shopping history is available for all kinds of purposes, from presenting a suggested shopping list to alerting him to discounts or reminding him about perishables purchased a month ago.

Hopping said a shopping cart could eventually be outfitted to interact with the shelves so a shopper could see an ad or an offer about chicken noodle soup just as he heads into the soup section.

On the horizon, the article said, is the day when every product is tagged with an RFID, or radio frequency identification chip, instead of a bar code. The chips, which don't have to be scanned, would allow shoppers to leave the store without checking out at all and get the bill on their credit card or store account.