About a year ago, I went shopping at a new grocery store. To my surprise, this store expected you to take your bagged produce over to a scale, select the variety of fruit or veg and print out a label to apply to the bag. This was done in the name of saving the check-out person the work of having to determine what type of apple or lettuce you'd just heaped into your grocery cart and speed things along. I was a little irritated when I first had to do it, and although I've come to enjoy playing with the machine, I still shudder over the process, as it creates more waste and renders the bag difficult to reuse due to the sticker. However, engineers have created a new check-out scanner/scale and this one is all set to put these produce-section scales with label printers out of business. This new scanner contains a camera that snaps an image of the non-barcoded produce. It compares the picture to its database of images in order to determine whether it is a bunch of bananas, an orange or a bag of brussels sprouts. This way the produce is identified, weighed and price is determined, simply by placing the item or bag on the scanner.
As the Appliances & Kitchen Gadgets blog points out, there are still elements that would require human input. How could the scanner tell whether the produce was organic or conventional? Additionally, some stores price their produce by unit instead of by the pound (four ears of corn for a $1). Would it also be able count quantities? Despite the limitations, it's still an interesting innovation.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-06-2008 @ 9:36PM
Colin said...
I used a bag-and-tagger for the first time at an Albert supermarket when I visited the Czech Republic this Spring. I loved it, and it was way better than having to answer questions at the cash- or worse, having the cashier call a manager over because they don't know the PLU.
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8-07-2008 @ 6:06AM
Hungover Gourmet said...
The self-checkout at one of our local grocery stores has had this technology in place for the last couple years but I find it slow. I still prefer Wegmans where you can bag and tag the produce by punching in the numeric code that's either labeled on the produce or clearly marked on the bins. It is a time saver when you get to the cashier, though.
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8-07-2008 @ 10:52AM
lizandrsn said...
I would have to think this method is prefered to being drastically overcharged for a common piece of produce by someone that wears a name tag for a living.
Not that a name tag is a bag thing, but being stupid is.
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