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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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12:26pm on Saturday, 4th June, 2011:

Scan and Go

Anecdote

In Sainsbury's, they have this system called "Scan & Go". You wander round the shop scanning your stuff as you buy it. This saves Sainsbury's the money they would otherwise pay someone on the checkout and it gives them data they can mine so they know how to organise the store to send you past things they want to sell you. In exchange for this, you get to queue to get the Scan & Go handset, stop after you pick everything up so you can scan it, then queue to get to the consoles where you can pay (ignoring two sets of instructions that tell you you how to operate it, going instead for what the unwritten instructions told you by the supervisor when you first tried it).

Today, I was wandering around doing my scanning and going, when suddenly the handset stopped working. I thought it was maybe stuck in some odd mode, but after about a minute it complained about being disconnected from the network. Here's what it looked like:

The image is small because if I enlarged it you'd see it was out of focus.

I'd done all my shopping except for three items. I'd scanned all my shopping except for those three items. Everyone else in the shop using Scan & Go had the same problem, and they all went to the regular tills at the same time. It took ages to get out.

Scan & go: gone.

Maybe next time I'll just do it the old-fashioned way and use a checkout. I'm not entirely persuaded it isn't quicker anyway, so long as there aren't queues...

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Scan and Go

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