Off Their Trolley
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
MediaCart, Microsoft and Wakefern teamed up early in the year and announced they were to deliver a “Next-Generation Digital Grocery Shopping and Ad Experience”
A number of publications have picked up again on the story of the “Wi-Fi Trolley” not least Iain Thomson over at VNUNET who writes “The trolley has a colour screen and uses Wi-Fi to pinpoint itself in the store and has an RFID sensor that is used to flash up offers on shelves. To find an item the user says the name of what they are looking for into a microphone on the trolley handle. Voice recognition software then identifies the item sought”
Personally we can’t think of anything worse than the trolley screen in front of you displaying recipes for food whilst you shop (that’s what they say it can do) and errr they also say that it flashes up a warning if an item chosen has too much fat in it!
Yeah right that’s the way for a Grocer to sell its high value pre-packed meals – “sir / madam please don’t buy that, it has far too much fat in it for you”
Another example of technology looking for a marketplace?
Perhaps in this already over complicated life a shopping trolley should just be a (simple) shopping trolley?
March 19th, 2008 at 23:01 @001
You can update the carts but you can’t update the shoppers. Consumers like to go to the grocery store and do the same thing and buy many of the same products over and over. The percentage of shoppers who would actually mess with this thing wouldn’t be very high, you would need people there to constantly show them how to use it. Sometimes, I think we get caught up in all the wiz bang tech we have today and think we need to put it to work “helping” shoppers. I think the gadgets we have these days are still crap. They are not reliable and need to much monitoring and fiddling around to be usable. This stuff won’t be accepted by the consumers until it’s REALLY simple and the tech just sort of fades to background and usability becomes the key issue. I don’t think our tech is there yet.