Smart Carts

On Tuesday Dr. Sypher talked to us about innovation and emerging technologies, and shared a video about IDEO. You'll recall IDEO was charged with building a better shopping cart. Today, new "smart carts" is indeed an area attracting much innovation in developing emerging technologies for the shopping experience.

MIT's Tech Review just released an article about the use of RFID tags, tracking, targeted consumer marketing, and knowledge of swarming behavior (think SmartMobs) to influence (and enhance?) the grocery shopping experience:

It's an established fact that consumers are more influenced by other people's purchasing decisions than they are by discounts, says Menezes. Furthermore, it's well-known that people will flock or swarm in certain conditions, such as when a fire alarm goes off. The idea here was to exploit both of these inclinations in order to create a swarm of impulse shoppers.

The introduction of so-called smart shopping carts should make this possible. Already being used experimentally by a number of supermarkets, these carts are capable of knowing what a customer has put in them by scanning the contents for an RFID tag: a sort of wireless bar code that is being introduced in products. And some carts, such as the Shopping Buddy, developed by Cuesol, in Quincy, MA, have touch screens.

So by monitoring the contents of everyone's carts, the screens could possibly feed information back to customers as they shop. For example, a customer entering a particular aisle may be informed, via the cart's screen, that 60 percent of customers currently have a specific product from that aisle in their cart. Similarly, when the customer places an item in the cart, he or she may be notified about other products purchased by customers who bought this one.

What do you think? Cool tool, or annoying intrusion? Are we seeing tools that benefit the consumer or the business?