An interesting shopping day today, amongst other shops I usually visit my local Tesco.
I know quite a few of the ladies who work there and often chat with various ones on the checkout and for example if I know its their birthday I drop them off a card, they usually remember mine as well. Today when I entered the store I was approached by a supervisor who asked if I would like to try out their new customer self scanning system to which I replied “providing it is not intended to take someone’s job away, then yes”. So basically the first time you use the system you scan your Tesco ‘points’ card and enter your post code on a screen, you only do this the first time of using the system, after that you just waft your club card under the reader each time you visit. Alongside of this screen is a large rack of hand held scanners and one of them will flash to indicate that it is the one you should pick up.
After that you just walk around the store and as you put something in your bags in the trolley you hold a button down to scan the bar code on the product or on the shelf below the product. As you do so the item name and price comes up on the scanner screen much like a till receipt along with a running total so you can see exactly how much an item has cost and how much you are spending. Now as you guys have probably figured out by now I was in my element with this technology and really gave it a good testing out much to the surprise of the younger in store customer service helpers who saw this old guy using it better than they could.
Most items are simply scanned from the packaging and any error in reading the code or otherwise immediately brings up an advice screen telling you what to do next. Loose items like say Vine Tomatoes are selected as usual and you put then on a ‘customer scale’ to weigh them which is multi-purpose and you can select the item via a series of icons or by just entering a letter (say T for tomatoes) and it will display a touch screen of all the items as icons and you just touch the appropriate one. After that it asks you to confirm (all touch screen) the item you chose and the price displayed and then it prints out a sticky bar code label that you stick on the bag and then scan, very simple and straight forward.
To be honest I could not fault the system, items that were say two for a certain price would get added together and the discount displayed and the total corrected to reflect the discount. I even tried a couple of ‘reduced price’ sticker labels and they again worked perfectly. If you want to replace an item back on the shelf, simply press the ‘remove’ button and scan it again and it gets removed from your scanner, really simple. The scanner screen can be scrolled through just like looking at a till receipt, so it can be useful in remembering what you have bought or even forgotten to buy. Of course the main benefit is that you can pack your bags as you go along and more importantly you do not have to empty your trolley, put everything on the conveyor and then repack your bags after paying for your shopping.
Paying was easy enough and I even had some Tesco loyalty vouchers and voucher for a £1 off to deduct and that was as simple as passing them over a flat scanner which deducted it from a large screen version of my hand scanner so you could see it had been deducted. They still need an assistant on the checkout to remove security tags from spirits etc. or to add on any items that you had a problem with scanning yourself. I was not surprised when as I plugged in my scanner that it uploaded a message saying something like “you have been selected for a random trolley check” “sorry for any delay” This meant that the assistant scanned a few items (about 6 at random) although I am guessing that every new user will get such a ‘random’ check just to see that (A) the system is working and (B) you are not thieving anything. Again I would guess that steadily you will build up some sort of honesty/security rating linked to your Tesco Customer Card that makes those checks less likely the more you use it. Overall it was quite painless and I did enjoy the experience and not humping shopping in and out of a trolley was a big bonus, I shall definitely use it again next week.