Supermarket Self-Checkout? There's An App For That, Too

For years now supermarkets have been trying to do away with checkout cashiers and bag people, instead asking us to do their job for them in the name of "convenience." And yet anyone who has spent twenty minutes watching helplessly as an old lady tries in vain to scan and re-scan a twelve-pack of Fancy Feast at Key Food knows that the new process hasn't quite led to the holy grail of a wait-less supermarket checkout. But that doesn't mean shopkeepers aren't working on it. To that end Stop & Shop has teamed up with a company called Modiv to take it to the next level, the smartphone checkout. As if our phones didn't know enough about us already.

The new iPhone app, Scan It!, should be on the iTunes store any moment now (don't confuse it with ScanIt) and should be quite easy to use to anyone familiar with the store's handheld scanner program. In theory a user will just open the app, scan their Stop & Shop loyalty card and then go about shopping as usual. Except instead of putting their groceries into a cart, they would scan them with Scan It! and then put them directly into shopping bags (along the way the app will offer them special deals depending on their shopping history and where they are in the store). When they are done the app adds up their total and all a customer has to do to pay is walk up to any register and scan their loyalty card again. As with self-checkout the whole thing would be on the honor system (with occasional spot checks).

Compared to other supermarkets Stop & Shop is in a good position to roll out such an app—they've already trained many of the customers at their 375 stores to scan for themselves with handheld scanners—but that doesn't make the idea of people wandering around the grocery store snapping pictures of barcodes any less surreal to us. And allowing people to pre-scan their groceries with their phones or with a handheld scanner or just take them to cashier just seems like a really good recipe for seeing some of your produce walk out of the store unpaid for (though to be fair, each store will decide which methods of checking out it accepts). It will, however, provide another great place to complain about bad phone service: "Oh, I'm sorry sir! I swear I scanned that rack of lamb—stupid AT&T!"