If you soon hear your shopping cart talking to you, relax – you’re not going crazy.
IBM is working on a so-called smart shopping cart that will help – or hector – grocery store customers as they push it through the aisles.
Just swipe a store card through a slot on the cart, and it will know what you’ve bought in the past, what you might need now, and what you can buy at discount.
Its suggestions will pop up on a screen, and could be tailored by programmers to anticipate where the shopper is headed in a store.
Dan Hopping, a consulting manager with IBM, said the cart eventually could be set to interact with store shelves so that a customer will be shown an ad about chicken soup as the person heads down the soup aisle.
The cart is just one of several shopping-related innovations being developed by IBM and companies such as NCR, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard in an effort to make grocery stores more competitive with price slashers like Wal-Mart.
“We’ll see more change in the next five years in the way people shop than in the last 20,” said Hopping, who specializes in store operations and merchandising.
The planned products including “Veggie Vision,” which with its digital camera and a library of hundreds of pictures of vegetables and fruits can determine what is being placed on its scale. It then weighs and prices the items.
With Post wire services