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More on Talking Shopping Carts
ThosLives writes "CNN.com is reporting a story about Talking Shopping Carts. (I rue the day when viruses attack these carts, telling everyone to go buy Brand X). This article also has some interesting comments about possible (and likely inevitable) uses of RFID. I wonder, in the future, will I be able to buy anything with our new funny colored cash dollars?" We've mentioned these before.
Great idea... ...as long as I know where the mute button is.
This will have about as much impact as the talking coke machines and verbal notifications in cars: they will be vandalized or torn out. I can see some modest value in a display that shows where related items are, being a guy who doesn't go shopping often. I might actually use it. My wife who seems to have memorized the incoherent ordering would be annoyed I suspect. (Who is it who decides that bread and tortilla products are unrelated? That whipped cream *isn't* a dessert topping, fit to be displayed with all the others.)
Sig under construction since 1998.
Viruses?
You think it's going to take viruses for this to happen?
-- james
Whatever happened to "News for nerds"? You know, interesting technology, computing industry developments, space flights, etc. Instead, we hear about talking shopping carts. Not to mention that Slashdot completely misses out on REAL news like the Java IDE Poll that turned the industry on its head and shocked developers worldwide. Instead, we hear stupid quotes like this:
> (I rue the day when viruses attack these carts, telling
> everyone to go buy Brand X)
How many computer viruses does your microwave have? Or your kid's Speek 'n Say? Or any other friggin' electronic device that we use on a daily basis? Someone hit these guys with a clue stick! You need an open platform to design and develop a virus. An embedded device would need to be taken apart and completely reprogrammed. I don't know where you guys are from, but around here, we call that vandalism.
(insert some swearing and grumbling)
Ok, I feel better now.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'd like to see some new inventions that actually help solve tasks instead of these creations that do everything possible to reduce the amount of thinking that we do. Are people really so lazy that we can't exert the neurological effort to figure out on our own whether or not there is toilet paper on the roll? Can we not look for ourselves to see what is on sale? Can we not figure out for ourselves what wine we like with salmon?
Lots of grocery stores in my neighborhood are adjacent to train tracks. This makes things easier. Put a cart on the tracks, train demolishes it, you go back and pick up the expensive pieces.
It is probably cheaper to just pay a telemarketing firm a flat fee to call their big list of phone numbers than it is to do research, collect data, analyze it, assemble that into a list, and finally hand that over to the telemarketing firm.
This would be consistent with the realization that we are becoming more and more desensitized to suggestion, and more suggestion and promotional invasion is needed to transmit the same message nowadays.
Ironically, the reason we're becoming desensitized to suggestion is because there is more and more suggestion and promotional invasion all the time.
I rarely even notice things like billboards, they just blur into the background with the rest of the signage. Banner ads on webpages, I definately don't even notice those (in fact, that's so bad that my brain will skip over headlines, if they're fancy graphics or look considerably different. I've often been looking around on a webpage for a long time, then suddenly I notice the "downloads" button or whatever I was looking for was right in front of me all the time. If it's designed in some slightly ad-looking style, my brain just subconsciously filters it out).
Speak before you think
You prepare a shopping list at home in some format, putting onto a micro floppy disk or some other easily transportable technology. You then plug that into the shopping cart when you arrive at the store and the shopping cart gives you the most optimum path to take through the aisles in order to pick up all the items on the list. A small LCD monitor would direct you to which aisle you needed to proceed to next.
I can't tell you how often I end up backtracking when I'm grocery shopping... it probably adds 50% to my overall time, maybe even more.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... you could select the thing you would like to buy on some touchscreen (or simply enter it, with a search function) and the car would lead you to the place where you can pick it up.
...
It might only be me, but I regularly get lost when I try to find something in those large supermarkets
This won't ever happen because it's well-documented that people spend more or less y dollars for every x minutes you spend in store. This leads to things like... Mushroom and tomato soups (most popular varieties) on the bottom shelf; thus, you are
a) more likely to walk past them, and have to come back later and
b) required to visually scan the other soup flavours in order to find what you're looking for, leading to more views of the branding on the can, and making you more likely to make an impulse purchase of a flavour that catches your eye.
Getting you out of the store more quickly is absolutely not going to be something grocery stores are going to want to work towards. If anything, they want you to enjoy your time so much that you'll want to be there longer.