Some Thoughts

If you have ever been to a supermarket on weekends - especially the likes of Big Bazaar and Spar Hypermarket - you will probably have had regretted the idea. I know some people cannot help but doing the shopping on weekends. But I am not a big fan of weekend bargains at the cost of standing in queue for 30 odd minutes. The opportunity cost of the time spent is far higher than the the monetary savings. But sometimes you cannot avoid these situations.

I was at Spar in Bangalore a couple of weeks back. Had to stand in the queue for almost 30-40 minutes. And I just had a couple of Red Bull's, a pack of cigarettes and something else. I had to go to Spar because that was the nearest place I could get the stuff. Thankfully, I was not alone and could take the opportunity to explore some of those concepts about EDLP and shelf space I have been learning about.

And then I thought can't this situation be improved?

Thought 1:

Please have separate counters for people with less than 5-10 items. Saves a lot of frustration and reduces the queues. Never ever been to a WalMart, but heard that is something they do. It must be the right way.

Thought 2:

This is more of  a product idea. Looked up the net but could not find something similar. How about the idea of giving the power of billing to the customers as and when they pick up the items from the shelf ? Difficult. But feasible. And all one needs is a mobile phone.

The billing could be done by a built-in bar code reader (some mobiles have this feature), or more feasibly using a camera-phone. The idea is to have an application that can read the bar code, using some image processing alogorithm, with the phone's camera. The application can then keep track of the items picked up. At the point-of-sales all that needs to be done is to download the data - maybe using bluetooth or infra-red or even using text in some way - and generate the bill.

The idea is just that till now. Of course there are issues that needs to be addressed. How to ensure ethical behavior on the part of the customers ? What kind of standard needs to be established to ensure transfer of the data at the point-of-sales? Is the technology feasible ?

But wouldn't something like this make the supermarket experience much better ?

If anyone reads this post, please feel free to leave your thoughts.