Microsoft’s new souped-up supermarket shopping carts may do for the grocery list what GPS did for driving directions.
A box of cereal will be scanned as it’s tossed in the cart. Shoppers at a loss for where to find refried beans or chocolate ice cream can be instantly directed to the right aisle and shelf.
And best of all, there’s no need to wait on the checkout line. Once the cart totals up everything inside, all shoppers have to do is swipe their card, bag the groceries and walk out the door.
There is a catch, of course. The new carts, which will soon be hitting the aisles of Shop Rites everywhere, also enable advertisers to make their case as you are walking by a particular item on the shelves.
“It targets an ad at the precise moment the decision is being made,” said Scott Ferris, general manager of Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions.
“Companies like Kraft have long had to rely on a ton of television or print advertising which is seen well before the shopping occurs,” he said. “We wanted to leverage the immediacy of the actual shopping experience.”
Using the store’s Wi-Fi network, the cart will know it is near the macaroni and cheese, for instance, Ferris said. It might advocate one brand over others and entice the shopper with a coupon while they are contemplating the choice.
There is even the potential to give the shopper an opportunity to second guess his or her choice after it is made – “Don’t buy brand X, try brand Y instead.”
The MediaCart is the result of a partnership between Microsoft, MediaCart Holdings and Wakefern Food Corp.
A shopper could write up a shopping list and send it to the cart on a Web site or via a smartphone, Ferris said.
Once at the supermarket, shoppers use their loyalty card to activate the cart, and then a series of optical and bar-code scanners read each item as it is placed inside.
Fruits and vegetables, which often do not have bar-code stickers, may require shoppers to plug in a code on the keypad.
Ferris promises that the interface will produce fewer headaches than many of the current self-checkout systems being used at superstores such as Home Depot.
“For one, Microsoft did not write the software for those systems,” he said. “But also, the ergonomics of the shopping cart are much better suited to scanning than the setup normally used.”