Indiana University and the consulting firm KPMG have taken a look at different retail technologies. They found a couple of things that really ring the customer's bells.
The technology that the people in their survey like the most gave them the ability to price individual items and put together a running tally of their purchases using a portable scanner and the bar code which is now universal in most retail settings.
The second technology that folks really liked was a form of in-store kiosk which helped them gather information about products they were interested in buying.
WALLY's COMMENT·There's so much hype today about the Internet that we lose track of some of the basic in-store technologies that have made major impact and will do so in the future.
For my money, the two biggest retail innovations in this century are the shopping cart and the bar code. Both of them made fundamental changes in the things that were possible in a store and therefore led to changes in way shopping got done.
Both the bar code pricing and the kiosk feed on people's desire not to be embarrassed. They want to be able to find information on their own without having to ask questions that they think will be perceived as dumb.
This is especially powerful when this cuts across age and gender lines. Young people don't want to look stupid to older people, and older people don't want to look stupid to younger people. Men don't want to look stupid to women and women equally don't want to look stupid to men. Hence, lots of questions go unasked that could be asked if some of the process were automated.
That's already working for many Internet merchants. The trick is just to extend this to the selling floor in the retail environment.
The kiosks that would do that can do other things as well. They can, for example, make available a full range of products sold by the retailer but not, perhaps, in that individual store. Several discounters are now experimenting with this very thing.
What they're doing is making appliance and other major-purchase items available in stores that do not stock these items or have room for them on the sales floor. Result? Increased sales.
Kiosks can also be used for gift registries. This is already being done as well. Both bridal and baby registries are common in many discount stores. The advantage of a kiosk tied to a network is that a gift registry is immediately available anywhere there is a store in the chain.
So how does that relate to the old barcode scanner these folks say they want to carry with them? If you've ever had a time when you've come up to the cash register and not had enough to pay for what you have, youâll understand that one. It's embarrassment again.
Would the price of computer chips and components dropping dramatically and would bar-coding being almost universal in the retail environment, expect to see this change implemented soon.
Created: 1999
Reviewed: 2/15/03
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