Ah, in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. In this context I am referring to the gratitude and amazement of some Swiss friends who rave about the game changing Passe Bene self scanning system introduced at Coop supermarketsI have to break it to them gently that a similar system was introduced by Safeway about 10 years ago!
Here is the essence of the revolutionary Swiss way
- You sign up and using your Coop loyalty card approach the front of the supermarket where there's an optical scanner
- You scan your card and it unlocks a portable optical scanner as pictured above
- You place this in the top of a shopping trolley and scan items as you shop
- When you get to the special checkout you hand over the gadget and then pay the bill
The mainly clever bit is that you scan your shopping on the fly and put it directly into bags. At the checkout you don't need to put any shopping onto the conveyor and then into a bag. This saves all that stretching and back ache and you should finish a little quicker.
Since we are in Switzerland where everybody is 100% honest you have to wonder under what conditions they make you do a manual rescan. It does happen sometimes and it is most annoying. We have noticed that this happens when the amount you spend is different from the norm, and maybe the programming thinks you have accidentally not scanned something.
Overall we like the system, saving us time and easing the task of the checkout operator. A great example of a win-win situation.
