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Retail Shrink? Could be Bob
Retail shrink due to BOB, or bottom-of-the-basket items, has long been a problem. Now there's word that a company called Evolution Robotics has invented a system to help cashiers identify items left there. The system called LaneHawk, which costs about $3K per lane, uses cameras to look under the basket for items that might be forgotten (or shoplifted) It's not without problems, however.
Evan Shuman wrote a great article on LaneHawk in CIO Insight. Sounds like nothing is perfect:
"It tends to be confusing items, such as confusing Diet Lime Coke with Diet Lemon Coke," Sakaguchi said. "Tide is a great example of something that is confusable. Often times, the only differentiator (of one Tide version from another Tide version) is a small splash of color. About 90 to 95 percent of the time, we'll correctly identify that there's a Tide product there," but it may not correctly identify
It's interesting to assume that this trend will continue. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, multiple data collectors will exist at the Point-Of-Sale: RFID, scanner, computer vision, and EM radiation devices. The various systems could collaborate on what the shopper has, perhaps greatly reducing (or eliminating) the need for a long checkout. Especially when combined with biometrics linked to bank accounts, the dream is for shoppers to just "leave" the store, with all of the accounting paperwork handled automatically.
UPDATE: Piggly Wiggly announces that it is the first grocer to start using a biometric payment system
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