Ahold's Stop & Shop Freshens Up

Have followed developments at Ahold's Stop & Shop stores or a number of years. They were early serious testers of the 'smart cart' ideas, using a display and scanner on shopping carts to help the consumer do a pre checkout in the aisle, minimizing time at the register. This approach, called the 'shopping buddy', also had the potential of delivering location-aware marketing messages. Tested this concept with virtual environments. Interaction in category context.

Now they are in the process of refreshing their stores via a 'value improvement' program. Interesting by itself, but the article also mentions that they have replaced the more complex cart displays with a system called EasyShop, which is a hand scanner that has a small screen (see above). This also allows pre-scanning, and is a less complex solution. Long checkout lines are a frequent complaint of shoppers and solving that problem the traditional way increases labor costs.

This is the first North American example of an in-aisle checkout system that has advanced beyond the 'test' phase and seems to be in production.

The Easyshop hardware is manufactured by Motorola and its software is written by Modiv Media. The system will be available in 90 stores. Will continue to follow.