High-tech grocery checkout
sunspot.net
[ Will esl technology be surpassed before making the grade? Perhaps, but it seems all new retail technology has the same initial euphoria followed by challenges to it's cost.]
By Andrew Ratner
Sun Staff
BRAINTREE, Mass. - Just back from a family vacation at Disney World and needing to replenish her pantry, Ellen Fullam entered a Super Stop & Shop near her home in this Boston suburb last week and ordered American cheese from the deli counter.
Nothing remarkable about that - except that Fullam was dozens of yards from the deli counter when she ordered. And when her cheese was ready, she was alerted by a flat-screen computer on her shopping cart while she was perusing another aisle. Her smart cart knew everything she has ever bought at a Stop & Shop, precisely where she was inside the store and the running total of her bill.
When she finished, she could pay her bill by herself without removing a product from the cart.
"It's quick, it's easy. It's just another new technology though. Things are always changing," Fullam said matter-of-factly, a 35-year-old teacher and waitress with her policeman husband and sons in tow.
Is this the future of grocery shopping, or all shopping for that matter?
Like it or not, do-it-yourself technology is advancing rapidly through the retail and service worlds. Airline passengers now check themselves in at airport kiosks. Casinos are installing cashless slot machines from which players collect their winnings electronically without a coin clinking. And libraries have begun using radio-frequency systems so their patrons can check out stacks of books practically without breaking stride at the exit. Invention's mother is necessity, but one of her children is named self-service.
Nowhere is this trend more prevalent than in supermarkets and large warehouse-type stores, whose managers struggle to find and keep cashiers and where long lines gave birth to the term "register rage." Shoppers in one survey considered grocery shopping just above visits to the dentist.
A billion self-serve transactions were made in the United States last year, up from 520 million in 2001 and 320 million in 2000, according to industry analysts. Self-checkout systems, in only 6 percent of grocery stores as recently as 1999, are now in almost one-third of the 32,000 supermarkets in the country, defined by making at least $2 million in annual sales.
"I don't know that any of us debate whether it's appropriate for groceries any more. It's an overnight success, 10 to 15 years in the making," said Jeff Roster, an analyst at Gartner Inc., an information technology research and consulting firm.
Consumers do not universally embrace the change. Some do everything they can to avoid self-checkout lanes at groceries and complain that they're being asked to do the work of cashiers. The machines seem balky at times and some users get flustered as a line of annoyed fellow shoppers backs up behind them.
Checkout technology hasn't so mystified and conquered since President George H.W. Bush reportedly expressed amazement at a common supermarket scanner in 1992, fueling remarks that he seemed out of touch.
But checkout automation is improving, a big reason that consumers are seeing more of it.
New models easier
Unlike the earliest models developed in the 1980s, the latest models accept various forms of payment, including checks. Touch screens and video animation have made the machines seem less threatening to users, now very accustomed to pumping their own gas and banking by machine.
Developers such as Optimal Robotics of Montreal are experimenting with new configurations that take up less space and solve the bottleneck of items clogging up the conveyor belt. And cheaper machines and increasing labor costs are making retailers take a second look if they believe they can recoup the cost in 18 to 24 months. A set of four self-service lanes costs about $100,000 to $200,000.
Baltimore and the rest of the mid-Atlantic are relative latecomers to the technology. In parts of Europe, it has been common for years. Self-service is also well-established in the Midwest and South.
Some experts believe that is because those regions are home to Kroger Co. of Cincinnati and Publix Super Markets Inc. of Lakeland, Fla., chain grocers that pioneered the systems' use in the United States, and NCR Corp., the Dayton, Ohio, company that made the first mechanical cash register 120 years ago.
But others see another connection: Political support for organized labor, which perceives self-service as a threat. "Look at the Bush vs. Gore map and the Bush areas are where most of the chains started self-checkout," said Greg Buzek, a retail technology consultant in Tennessee.
He noted that California and the Northeast, birthplaces of major innovations in computing but also politically liberal and pro-union, have been slower to adopt the technology.
The Labor Department in a 2000 report acknowledged the rise of self-service technology but didn't foresee a heavy bite in the demand for cashiers. There are about 3.4 million of them, about one-third working in food stores.
"This is an emerging issue in small markets and big markets. It's a challenge for us," said Jill Cashen of the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union in Washington. Cashiers represented by the union earn about $11 an hour and at Northeast chains such as Stop & Shop as much as $16 an hour, plus benefits. The average cashier wage is $7 an hour.
Fate of cashiers
Predictions of doom for cashiers may be overstated, though, if the experience of self-service automation in banking is a guide.
The number of U.S. tellers has remained flat at roughly 85,000 since 1990, even while ATM transactions doubled, to 14 billion last year. ATMs altered behaviors and led customers to bank more often, said John Hall, a spokesman for the American Banking Association in Washington. But given the rise in transactions and middle-class wealth, it's also arguable that the machines, which have quadrupled in availability to nearly 350,000, kept financial institutions from having to hire tellers to keep up with the growth.
Some experts believe self-service checkouts will become more used and useful with refinements in radio-frequency identification systems, being developed most prominently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Already in wide use at toll booths and for credit purchases at Exxon Mobil gas stations, so-called RFID systems can check out a cart full of items in an instant without removing one.
Such a system is already in use at a grocer in South Africa. An IBM Corp. commercial offered a humorous glimpse of the future, depicting a shoplifter being handed his receipt, unaware that his concealed goods had been charged to his account by RFID tags. But the price of the tags will have to drop 10-fold, to pennies apiece, to make the benefit worth the expense on a mass scale, some experts agree.
One of the more intriguing self-serve experiments in the United States is at a market owned by Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. The New England supermarket chain shares the same Dutch parent company, Royal Ahold NV, as five other U.S. supermarket chains, including Giant Food Inc. in Maryland.
A month ago, Stop & Shop launched "Shopping Buddy" at its large store in Braintree, a middle-class suburb at the south end of Boston's "T" commuter rail.
At the store's entrance, a rack holds about 60 devices that look like industrial-strength Etch-A-Sketch toys.
Shoppers daring enough to try the device, developed by Symbol Technologies Inc. of Long Island, N.Y., and CueSol, a shopping software developer in nearby Quincy, mount it in specially designed handles on their carts. Customers swipe their "frequent shopper card" in the machine - or borrow a generic card from the service counter.
What customers don't see is as remarkable as what they do. The tablets transmit a wireless signal to CueSol's computer servers a few miles away. From there the connection moves over fiber-optic lines to Ahold's mainframe in Greenville, S.C., where the customer's shopping history and account is stored. The information then returns to Braintree via the Internet to the "Shopping Buddy" devices on the shopping cart.
The process takes less than 2 seconds.
Because of wireless transmitters affixed to the ceiling of the supermarket, the machine-equipped cart always "knows" its location in the store. If a customer's history indicates that she favors a certain brand of orange juice, the machine screen will alert her to a sale on it when she nears the refrigerated section. If she can't find a product, a quick computer search on her cart screen will locate the item and even display a store map to show how close she's getting as she walks toward the item.
Users can order deli products with the "Shopping Buddy" touch screen and even specify whether they prefer their bologna thick or thin. A screen prompt alerts when the order is ready.
And with a detachable scanner, smaller and lighter than most cell phones, shoppers can scan their items and get a running sum as they drop them in the cart. If they've already placed bags in the cart, they can check out with the scanner and pay for their items without removing anything from the basket.
"This is so much easier," said Elizabeth Murphy, 36, as her 9-year-old son, Evan, "blasted" bar codes for her with the reportedly kid-proof scanning tool.
"Usually, I'm running around asking 'Do you know where this is?' but it has this global-positioning type system that finds things and tells you if you're getting warmer. When I found what I was looking for, it was so exciting," she said.
"I hope this is going to be coming down to the Cape," said Elaine Marston, a 59-year-old Cape Cod resident visiting her daughter. After scanning two jumbo lemons, she decided to put one back and with the scanner erased the second entry. "It's like a toy."
Most customers here aren't ready to play yet, however. Of roughly 15,000 shoppers in the store each week, about 3,000 are using the "Shopping Buddy" and maybe 2,000 of them are using it to check out at the end, said Mike Grimes, vice president of sales and marketing for CueSol.
Shoppers pleased
Stop & Shop has been quiet about the rollout, with some in-store promotion only, but the chain is pleased with how customers have responded so far. Some shoppers have told managers they even spend a little more while using the devices because they can tell how close they are to their budget limit.
Grimes said CueSol also took some cues from general complaints about the Internet, now awash in annoying "spam" and pop-up ads. Its system doesn't sell advertising, like some earlier failed "video" shopping cart systems in the 1990s, nor attempt to convert shoppers from their typical brands. (CueSol is also working on a version that would allow wives to e-mail shopping lists to their husbands on "Shopping Buddy," although requiring the husband to buy only the listed items may be beyond technology's reach.)
The system also has some built-in protections against shoplifting - the first question many people ask about the "Shopping Buddy."
Shoppers get "scored" by the computer the first time they use it so the machine has a basis for future patterns, such as how much time an individual typically takes in a particular aisle, Grimes said. Closed-circuit television cameras also monitor shoppers the old-fashioned way, through surveillance. Conventional self-checkout systems check theft by matching the weight of the items on the conveyor belt with the weight of the items scanned and flagging discrepancies.
If such systems increase "shrink" - retailers' euphemism for shoplifting - that will be their demise. Kmart Corp., for one, blamed its self-checkout aisles for contributing to shoplifting and asked last month to be excused from its contract with the supplier in its bankruptcy case.
But some grocery executives and analysts contend self-service checkout has reduced another form of theft: "sweethearting" by cashiers who let friends get away without paying their full bill.
And system developers are finding ever new ways to combat temptation. At NCR, researchers discovered that people respond with more alarm to a recorded male voice than to a female one. They reserve the male recording in self-service lanes for times when the machine detects a problem or security threat, said Michael R. Webster, vice president and general manager of NCR's FastLane division.
Long-standing fears about pitfalls, however, appear to be yielding to a belief that the technology can improve efficiency, convenience and even competitive advantage.
"If you look at a target shopper - a mom, a busy mom - anything you can do to make mom's experience easier, there's a benefit that binds," said Rick Stockwood, a Stop & Shop spokesman. "How many people didn't have cell phones five years ago, or before DVDs rocked the videocassette world? People are more accustomed to this. In the grocery business, technology and convenience can go hand in hand."
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