Price Scanner
I was walking around a major department store yesterday, slowly collecting an assortment of items from clearance racks. At the store I was at, merchandise tends to be disheveled, so I was taking my collection of items to the price scanner to make sure all of the ones I had were, in fact, 75% off.
There was a couple small problems with this. First, I had to track down the location of the scanner in the store. Then, the first one that I found was in operating system mode...someone had yet to boot up the actual software that handled the scanning. So then I went off to find another one, where there was a line.
My thinking is, the scanner itself makes sense as a mobile phone app. This makes a great deal of sense, especially in one of those Byzantine department stores. People are already scanning UPCs on their phones in order to find products in Amazon's mobile app. It's not a stretch for any major retailer to expose their inventory prices by store, detect which store the customer is at by their GPS, and give the customer their own handheld price scanner.
There was a couple small problems with this. First, I had to track down the location of the scanner in the store. Then, the first one that I found was in operating system mode...someone had yet to boot up the actual software that handled the scanning. So then I went off to find another one, where there was a line.
My thinking is, the scanner itself makes sense as a mobile phone app. This makes a great deal of sense, especially in one of those Byzantine department stores. People are already scanning UPCs on their phones in order to find products in Amazon's mobile app. It's not a stretch for any major retailer to expose their inventory prices by store, detect which store the customer is at by their GPS, and give the customer their own handheld price scanner.