Sometimes shopping can be a bit of a handful, coins, cash-cards, loyalty cards, vouchers and then there's whatever you're buying. As technology develops shops are looking at ways they can making things quicker and easier for their comsumers.
One of the hyped up technologies of this year is NFC and shops are starting to pay attention.
The Future Store, near Dusseldorf in Germany (the combined initiative of 90 different retail and technology companies, from Coca Cola to IBM) aims to explore lucrative links between technology and shopping habits.
“Our store was created as a ‘living lab'”, says Dr Gerd Wolfram, managing director of Metro Systems, part of the global supermarket chain that runs the Future Store.
“We test new shopping concepts with our staff and customers, and if they are good enough we bring them to our other stores.”
The store is willing to try anything from robotic shopping assistants, to fridges that know exactly how much food they hold and when it expires. But not all gadgets are welcomed with open-arms, the first big failure of the future shop was a fingerprint payment system.
“The technology worked, but people didn’t accept it. If times change, then we will try it again.” Said Wolfram.
Will NFC see the same fate?
The Future Store already uses an iPhone app that is meant to speed up payment. It works by letting users scan barcodes of items as they pick them off the shelves which then helps to generate a final barcode which is displayed on their phone to be scanned at a self-service checkout so that less time is spent at the tills.
But the problem lies with using your phone to scan barcodes, which demands both hands, and takes around 10 to 15 seconds. Clearly NFC needs to be smoother before it can hit the mainstream.
But it's not just consumers that benefit but the staff too. For example, a butcher at the Future Store monitors real-time stock levels on a tablet computer.
Check out the video below to see him and his tablet in action and see how shoppers are responding to the future shop and its gizmos.
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