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How many times have you stood in the soup aisle at the supermarket and called home to ask, “There are six kinds of tomato soup, which one do you want?” Or how many times have you gotten home and realized you forgot to buy the key ingredient to your world famous chili recipe?
If only your shopping cart were smarter than you are.
It soon could be.
One of the more interesting exhibits at the Embedded Systems Conference this week in San Jose, Calif., was of the “Concierge Smart Shopping Cart.” Developed jointly by BSquare Corp. and Springboard Retail Networks, the smart cart is a small networked computer mounted on a shopping cart handle that helps you do your shopping in ways so intuitive you might consider them scary.
Concierge has been in use on a trial basis since November 2008 at Bloom’s, an upscale grocery store in North Carolina, but Springboard hasn’t revealed which other retailers may roll out the service.
The Concierge experience begins when a shopper makes their list on their home computer linked to the supermarket’s Web site. When the shopper arrives at the store, they begin pushing the cart down the aisle. They can enter their Web site username and password on the 8.5-inch diagonal touch-screen LCD panel, or scan their loyalty card past the bar code reader, and up pops their shopping list.
The bar code reader also tells you the price of each item as you put it in your cart and keeps a running total so there are no surprises at the checkout counter.
The Concierge connects to an ultra-wideband wi-fi network in the store. Here’s where it gets weird. Using location-based technology on the network, Concierge knows where your cart is and arranges your shopping list by where the items are located in the store. You’re in Aisle 1? Aisle 1 is where you can find the toothpaste and shaving cream on your list.
You will never again have to humble yourself by asking a clerk where the Preparation H is.
But the Concierge system has other capabilities retailers will really like. Being on the network means the store can frequently update information sent to the device, such as specials on products. You may intend to buy Pepsi, but Coke is on sale.
Concierge can suggest recipes you can try and show you where to buy the ingredients, or you can call up your own recipes that you’ve saved on the store’s site. It also offers a QWERTY keyboard for you to search for products by product type or brand name. It also can highlight specials on products not on your list, but which you've bought before, when you reach the aisle where they're stocked.
“Retailers are looking for a way to upsell the customer,” said Carey Butler, vice president of professional engineering services for BSquare. “This device captures demographic information about what people are buying.”
BSquare designed the device, including licensing the Microsoft CE operating system and the Adode Flash that delivers the graphics. Springboard will sell the service to retailers so they won’t incur the capital expense of buying the devices or building the network. Springboard and the retailer also split the ad revenue from food companies that advertise on the device.
Concierge can also be modified to serve a home improvement store, a discount department store, or any other retailer that provides shopping carts to customers, said Butler.
In a presentation at the ESC at the McEnery Convention Center, Butler told her audience that Concierge is a device that is likely to be embraced by Generation Y, the people born between the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, who essentially grew up on the Internet and who use it for product research and comparison shopping. The oldest of them are starting families and will need to know Pampers are in Aisle 6, but that the store brand is on sale for 30 percent less.
BSquare has built similar networked computer systems for rather mundane applications such as industrial control systems, but this project was fun, Butler said. “This is a great project for BSquare to work on because we can all relate to the shopping experience.”
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