"checkout" news and stories

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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Awesome: the idea behind bulk food. Cheaper, more control over the quantity, easy.

Not-so-awesome: the collection and storing of bulk food. Most supermarkets provide plastic bags, which are not only bad for the environment, but are messy to store, can break or leak easily, and typically result in a pile of unusable crumbs.

But a friend of mine has come up with an easy solution that I'm jealous I didn't think of first: she bought a few of these Droppar storage jars (at left) from IKEA (although any small metal or glass jar with a lid would do), and brought them to her local Whole Foods store. The cashier first weighed the jar itself, which she wrote on a piece of tape and placed on the jar lid.

Each time my friend buys in bulk, she simply brings her jar with her, writes the checkout code on a sticker which she keeps on the jar, and brings it to the cashier, who subtracts the weight of the jar and charges her for just the food. Easy, environmentally-friendly, and easy to store when she gets home. (Another idea? Just wash out peanut butter or pasta sauce jars, place stickers on the sides, and reuse those).

Warning: this should work at Whole Foods and Wild Oats, or other similarly-minded food stores, but I don't know if other stores would agree - you'd have to call your local supermarket out find out.

Retailers are reporting a drop in their sales of impulse items - those sodas, candies and packets of gum that are stacked up in checkout lines - since they have switched to self-checkout lanes at some stores. Customers are too busy watching the register availability to pick out additional snacks, assuming that such snacks are even available near the new machines. Statistical data was collected by a retail consulting firm, which noted that women's impulse buying dropped by 50% and men's by 27.9%. The biggest drops in sales were in individually packaged salty snacks (down 53%) and sodas and bottled waters (down 50%).

While this may be bad news for retailers, it is good news for consumers. Not only will shoppers save a few dollars when they're out shopping, but they will save thousands of calories over the course of the year - avoiding a potential weight gain of 2.5 pounds, according to the above-mentioned retail firm. The "Self Checkout Diet" may not become a best seller, but this information is certainly something worth keeping in mind the next time you're out at the store.

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Despite the fact that the advertising slogan for Cadbury Thins is "Thin is in," clearly Cadbury does not think so. The 100-calorie Canadian snack bar is being tucked away in tiny packaging at the end of the checkout counter and mixed in with the cosmetics selection at drug stores so that people who purchase the product will not feel embarrassed. And by people, Cadbury means women. Cadbury feels that not only do women feel guilty when they go to purchase chocolate, but they are ashamed to purchase the slimmer chocolate bar. If this marketing strategy works for the company in their Canadian market, it is only a matter of time before other snack food producers follow Cadbury's lead and begin to tuck their products where shoppers will not expect  to find them.

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