Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpadovani | Hacker News Reader

In Italy, it has been years, if not decades, that in a chain of large supermarkets there is a system where, when you enter the supermarket, you can pick up a barcode reader.

While you are doing your shopping, you scan your products. At the exit, you scan a QR code to end the shopping, you pay, and off you go.

The huge advantage, apart from no queues, is that you don't have to remove stuff from your cart, making it way, way quicker.

You can have a “random” check where everything will be scanned again by a real cashier.

View on HN

> is that you don't have to remove stuff from your cart, making it way, way quicker.

I don't understand the mechanics. You need to put the physical item back and also remove it from the barcode reader, no?

No, that's the fancy part. You pick up a barcode reader at the entrance, something like [0]. When you pick something from the shelf, you scan it, and put in the cart. You don't remove the stuff from the cart until your car, so you can already fill up your bags in the cart!

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Barcode-...

Ah! You mean "remove" as in "after you bought and paid for it" and not "if you decide not to buy it" (as you would remove an article from a online shopping cart). Gotcha.

Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you here but he probably meant that you don't need to remove the items from your cart in order to pay for them.

Old method: Place items in cart -> Arrive at checkout -> Take all the items out of the cart -> Scan all the items -> Put all items back cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items out of cart.

Scanner method: Scan item -> Place in cart -> Pay -> Go to car -> Take all items of out cart

You could even set up your bags in the cart so that when you pay everything's already bagged up.

Cutting out the repeated loading/unloading saves a decent amount of time and there's usually very little wait when you need to pay. Some stores in my country support using your phone as the barcode scanning device, it's very quick. I can imagine that at some point the phone could be used to handle the payment as well, at which point it'd be very close to the Amazon pick up and go model.

Only problem is that this relies on a loyalty card, at least for the ones I've seen, which makes it a non-starter for many people.

Hmm, while I've never bothered to use it (I'm happy with the self-checkouts) I'm 99% sure that the one at my local big Tesco doesn't require you to have the loyalty card; you just bring the scanner gadget to a special automatic checkout.

Why is a loyalty card a non-starter?

Personally I was too stingy for the initial 25€ fee, and then forgot about it, because in the meantime self-service proliferated and lines were much shorter there.

EDIT: also my experience with telecom companies in Italy made me distrustful of any sort of subscription program.

This is perhaps an Italian problem? In the UK loyalty cards are generally free, even if you were required to have one for the scan-as-you-shop systems. This used to be only Waitrose before the other supermarkets (Sainsburys, Tesco, etc) adopted them.

Same goes for Switzerland. Both Migros and Coop offer this, and both require a loyalty card (and also a payment method, obviously), but those are free too.

Privacy concerns?

Not being snarky, I'm genuinely asking. What are the privacy concerns here? That your name is associated with the store you shop at? Wouldn't one also get that from their debit or credit card that most people use to pay for things nowadays?

At least in Europe, you need a suitable legal basis for processing under the GDPR, at least in theory (we do know however that GDPR enforcement is significantly lacking so this might be just a false sense of security as there are no consequences to breaching the regulation).

Signing up for a loyalty card would give them that legal basis, where as merely using your payment card wouldn't, so they theoretically shouldn't be stalking you. In practice, not giving them your name/contact details also means there's no chance of spam arriving from them. There's was never a moment I said "I wish my supermarket would contact me out of the blue for any reason" and I'd like to keep it that way.

There is exactly one reason why I wish a supermarket would contact me out of the blue: a recall, since they would in theory know what I purchased if I used the card, so no need to first hopefully hear about the recall, then try to figure out if it applies to me.

That said, I've never heard about that as a benefit from a market in the US, just discounts on food items (or put differently, upcharges if you don't use a card).

Not that we have GDPR-level protections here either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com