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Comment by rpadovani | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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