Bring on the Grocery Shopping Robot Clones!
You know, I was thinking about it today; (Could you see the smoke from wherever you were?) Grocery shopping is effectively the most inefficient activity in which we partake! Stay with me a moment, please. You grab your shopping cart and pluck things from each aisle, only upon finishing this task, remove the said items and place them on the conveyor belt.
The cashier rings up your totals and you then take those same items and throw them in a bag, only to put them back in your cart! After you part with your cash, you then remove the bags from the cart, throw them in your trunk and drive home.
You then remove the bags from your car, set them on your counter and remove the items you’ve touched almost three times only to put them away into cabinets.
You know what would be neat? Having a little weatherproof computer on each pre-bagged cart that catalogues the items your cart. It then prints out a receipt that you can hand to a cashier and voila, all you gotta do is remove the bags from the shopping cart and throw them in your trunk.
What would be even better, is if those items once paid for, transported themselves to your house automatically, unpacking on the counter to be put away in the proper places.
Man, I just love science fiction some times!
In the meantime, I’ll happily just take a grocery shopping robot clone that will do the work for me. 
(I wish.)
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Comments
The future plan is to just have an RFID chip on everything and be scanned out at the exit.
no more lines
Posted by: ed | October 16th, 2007 05:48
Well, that’s what Stop and Shop’s Peapod is supposed to be. The problem is that you never know what quality the produce is going to be when you get it. I’d think that you should be able to pre-order you packaged goods from the computer right before you leave home. You’d arrive to pick up your cart full of soup cans and ice cream (so it would have to be in a refrigerated area, I guess), and the only things you’d actually browse would be the fresh vegetables, meat, and fish.
What drives me up the wall is the random way they put things together. It’s deliberate, so you have to walk all over the store to get the things you need. In an optimally organized store, milk and bread would be right in the front. In fact milk is usually the farthest from the entrance, because they know it’s what you come in for most, and putting it there maximizes the chance of impulse buys. The bread is usually not so far back, but is in the middle of the store, which forces you to sweep a large area of the store in your search for staples.
Posted by: Udarnik | October 16th, 2007 15:19