The Hartford Courant: Stop & Shop has deployed new hand-held scanners in several of its Connecticut stores. The purple devices allow customers to keep a running total of the groceries they've scanned and then pay at a self-service station at the end of their trip without having to take everything out of their shopping baskets again.
Modiv Media Inc., which manufactures the Scan It! system, claims that the portable scanners can shave an average of 12 minutes from a trip to the grocery store, but might also increase the number of times people shop. Supermarkets stand to get more business, too. Shoppers buy an average of 10 percent more during every visit and increase the frequency of their visits by another 10 percent when using the scanners. At that rate, a company representative said, the system pays for itself in a year.
