Shopper stores loyalty cards on his iPhone

Blogger Albert Alberts recently took matters into his own hands when he noticed his wallet getting over-stuffed with loyalty and membership cards. Tired of carrying them all around, he scanned each one of them into his iPhone.

"To test it out I went to the local hardware store and asked the girl behind the counter if she could scan the barcode from my phone," he writes in his blog. "The first look I got was pure amazement. To her the physical card was transformed into a picture on a shiny device. On top of that the barcode was scanned successfully. The result: a slightly confused girl and a happy me."

Alberts writes that he stores the images in a simple iPhoto album. When it comes time to show the card to a cashier for scanning, he simply opens up that "card" in full-screen mode.