How can technology be used for shoppers' benefit?

Shopping. What a chore! And shops like supermarkets, where you have to line up in order to pay after putting everything on a conveyor belt, are worst of the lot. Surely there is more they can do to make the experience -- well, "pleasurable" might be stretching it a bit; tolerable, perhaps?

This week I'd just like to take a break from writing about educational matters as such, and talk about technology. Specifically, how technology could be used for shoppers' benefit. Mind you, this is the sort of thing you could discuss with students. In England's National Curriculum, for example, students have to consider:

"the impact of ICT on individuals, communities and society, including
the social, economic, legal and ethical implications of access to, and
use of, ICT."

There is nothing quite so specific in the NETS for Students, but I think it's implied in expressions like "Leadership for digital citizenship" and "identify and define authentic problems and significant questions for investigation."

So, how to make supermarket shopping slightly more bearable? To be fair, my local supermarket,  a branch of Tescos, has made a sterling effort in this direction.

Living up to its motto, "Every Little Helps", it has installed self-service aisles to save people time. This innovation is not without its problems, but the company's heart is in the right place.

Indeed, talking of heart, it also tries to do its bit for the local community by displaying photos of missing children, with numbers to phone if you have information.

All well and good, but there is one thing that the company has not taken into account, and that is the predisposition of some of its customers to treat the supermarket as some sort of social club. When I go to the supermarket, I usually have three objectives in mind:

1. To have a break from slaving over a hot computer,
2. To buy stuff we need, and
   
3. To do it in the least amount of time possible.

Is #3 too much to ask?

The other day I was in the line for the checkout. The cashier was a very pretty girl of around 18 or 19. The customer in front of me was around 70. Unfortunately, nobody had told him that his days of chatting up young girls should have ended eons ago. Well, all right: Live and let live, I say. If you want to make a fool of yourself then go ahead -- but preferably not when it is me who is behind you in the queue.

As a consequence of this, and the fact that the cashier, being polite, chatted back, the whole process took a lot longer than it need have done, and my blood pressure was rising proportionately.

Surely, I thought to myself, there must be a technical solution to this kind of problem?

I think I have come up with quite a good solution. In fact, were I less modest I should describe it as evidence of genius. Here goes:

The self-service checkouts I mentioned earlier seem to "know" when something is on the conveyor belt that shouldn't be, or when something has been removed when it shouldn't have. There appears to be a means whereby it counts the number of items. So, why can't this technology be used in the regular checkouts? This is the way I envisage it working:

1. The customer transfers their items from the basket or cart to the conveyor belt
2. The conveyor belt counts how many items there are.
3. The computer then works out how long it should take to process those items, perhaps adding a 10 per cent margin of error in case a bar code won't scan properly or something.
4. If the estimated time exceeds the 10% addition, something starts bleeping.
5. After another two minutes, a loud synthesized voice announces, "Please get a move on, you are holding everyone up."
6. After another two minutes, a snapshot is taken of the offending customer, which is later transferred to a large billboard at the entrance of the store warning people not to get in a line behind this person, unless they like having their time wasted.
7. Finally, as an incentive to cashiers to not engage in any idle chatter with customers, their wages are docked according to the number of minutes they have allowed to be wasted.

There are a number of things to note about this idea:

• It makes use of existing technology....
• ... most of which the supermarket has already purchased.
• It would speed up the paying process.
• It could pave the way for customers to be given reward points for speed shopping.

Who knows? Perhaps those banes of modern life -- CCTV, automated processes, synthesized voices -- can actually be used to make some aspects of our lives better. To coin a phrase, every little helps!

Terry Freedman is a U.K.-based education technology consultant and publishes the ICT in Education website at www.ictineducation.org, and the electronic newsletter “Computers in Classrooms.

POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM

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