Eric Forbes

I was home from California to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. On the way home, my parents and I stopped at the Giant Food Store in Rocks Springs, Maryland to do some grocery shopping. I’ve been to this store years ago and was pleasantly surprised to find a brighly-remodeled interior featuring a new wireless scanning system called ScanIt.

Impressed with the innovation, I talked my parents into using it for this shopping trip. It seemed simple enough to get started:

1. Scan your Giant member club card into the central scanner of the display.
2. Watch for the hand held scanner with a flashing light around its base.
3. Pick up the chosen scanner and wait about a minute for it to initialize.
4. Grab some empty paper and/or plastic shopping bags and start shopping.

The scanner was made by Motorola, seemed durable, and scanned faster than anything I’ve seen in a store. In about 1/2 a second, it could scan and return the item description and price using its wireless link to the store computer. Impressive!

However, the scanner itself was a pain to hold on to for the entire trip. There was no dedicated place to put it (except in the baby seat of the shopping cart) and sending Dad off to get what he wanted while Mom and I shopped with the cart was a bit of a hassle as one of us had to ensure that items were scanned before being put into the shopping bags. The novelty factor was high, and these little issues did little to dampen our enthusiasm for a new way to shop at Giant Food.

Once in the produce section, we quickly realized that there were no barcodes on the bananas or other food that needed to be weighed before being scanned. Another customer quickly came to our aid while I jokingly tried to scan a naked bunch of bananas. He pointed to the ScanIt! weigh station and showed us which touch panel button to press so that the correct label would be printed next to the scale. I half-jokingly said that “I feel like I work here. Now I’m behind the meat counter. They should pay us to replace their employees with our own scanner.” The joke was soon to be on me as we approached the ScanIt! self-checkout aisles.

While the handheld scanner never failed at scanning the UPC barcodes on every item we wanted and the label for our bananas printed next to the scale in the produce area, the checkout process was less than straightforward and fraught with problems that caused a serious delay and reduced my confidence in using this system in the future.

Here’s what happened during what should have been the finale of a smooth and impressive trial of cutting-edge grocery shopping technology:

1. We easily found the aisle to use for check out. The overhead signs were clearly marked with lavender and yellow “ScanIt” logos and had a customer-facing touch screen, scanner bed, and place to charge the wireless scanner in our possession.
2. I would have assumed that simply placing the scanner in the charging base would start a chain of events leading to acceptance of payment and the printing of a receipt, but it wasn’t that easy.
3. Instead, we had to scan our Giant member club card again to identify who we were. It wasn’t enough to be in possession of the scanner that was released to us only after we scanned our member card in the first place. That’s weird and it wasn’t explained on the placard above the check out area.
4. Step 1 of the placard asked us to scan a barcode located on the placard in order to signal the end of shopping. That’s what I did to no avail.
5. We called someone to help us. That’s when we learned about the need to scan the Giant member club card before trying to scan the end of shopping barcode on the placard. Again, there were several signs around the checkout area, each vying for our attention. The most prominent one located right above the touch screen made no mention of scanning your member club card first. Confusing!
6. Once the manager got us to scan our member card, the wireless scanner we had been holding accepted the end of shopping barcode on the placard and the items we had stored so far were loaded into the checkout lane terminal.
7. We selected the payment method (credit card) and swiped our credit card.
8. The manager left and we thanked her for her help. That was premature.
9. After signing the signature capture area with a special pen and pressing OK, the receipt printer attempted to print our receipt but instead suffered an internal paper jam. No paper receipt rose from the printer. Serious grinding noises arose in its place.
10. I signaled for someone to reprint our receipt.
11. This time, a regular employee (yellow blouse) came to help us. She made it clear from the onset that she didn’t know much about this new system but manhandled the receipt printer until the lid came open and the accordion  pleated wad of paper sprung out of the top area.
12. She unfolded the paper and we all saw that only the Giant logo and the first line had printed legibly. The rest was blank, folded paper, completely useless as a way to show what we had just paid for.
13. I asked to get a reprint of the receipt now that the printer was reloaded with paper. The employee answered that she didn’t know how to do it. Instead of calling for a manager to help us, she pointed to the Customer Service counter near the exit and told us that “maybe someone there can help you get a receipt.” I didn’t accept that answer. I wanted someone to give a receipt while were still at the checkout area, otherwise, we would be leaving the aisle with no proof of having paid for the groceries in our bags. She didn’t seem to care about that minor lapse in logic.
14. My father went to the Customer Service counter while my mother and I stood with our groceries at the checkout counter. I raised my hand again and yet another Giant employee came to help.
15. This time, Bev from the Bel Air Giant store (manager) came to help. I asked for a reprint of our receipt after explaining what happened moments before and within 30 seconds, she had logged in with her badge, selected the appropriate touch screen buttons, and had our receipt for us. “Don’t forget your coupons,” she said before asking if we had any other needs that day. Impressive.

Unfortunately, the entire adventure was remembered for its cumbersome point of sale experience and rude handling by the second Giant employee who should never have been placed in customer contact in the first place. She was poorly-trained and did not help us get out of the store. Instead, her insistence that she did not know how to reprint the receipt and that Customer Service might be able to help (without offering any reassurance that they in fact would help us) was disheartening.

Giant Food has been the higher-end choice in Maryland for several decades and has obviously invested heavily in the Rock Springs store’s renovation and new technology. However, it seems to have ignored the customer’s perspective when developing this otherwise impressive technology.

First:

What prevents a customer from placing items into the cart (and bags) that were never scanned? There was no weighing of the bags before checking out or any form of double-checking what was scanned and what the customer actually left with.

Second:

Having to organize items into separate shopping bags in the shopping cart while shopping is cumbersome. It’s hard to know where to put things as you shop for them. Bread goes higher in the bag than eggs and canned goods. Shopping rarely follows the order that items go into a shopping bag. This is a problem from the beginning and can be resolved by leaving the bagging until the end of the checkout process.

Third:

The scanner offers wireless operation and an engaging full color LCD showing the items in your cart and random coupon offers while you shop, but needs to be held or placed somewhere in the cart where it can be quickly retrieved to scan before you bag each item. Scanning-As-You-Go seems like a great idea, but it’s not very intuitive and greatly interferes with the impulse to buy whatever catches your eye from each shelf and area of the store.

Having to weigh your produce, select the type of produce, attach the resulting barcoded adhesive label and finally scan it with the handheld scanner was another hassle. It was clear that the customer was taking the place of one or more employees in the process of scanning and labeling products and with no efficiency gains in the process, where’s the incentive to us this cutting edge technology?

If Giant’s first priority was to make its customers happy, it would train and manage all of its employees to handle us the way only one (Bev) did – personally, professionally, and efficiently. If Giant wanted to enhance customer loyalty, it would create an unforgettable and positive experience every time.

Instead, it was clear that we had engaged with a new and somewhat tangled system that intended to replace employees but instead required 2 managers and 1 other employee to help us through the lengthy, confusing, and stressful checkout process. The extra steps expected of us – to scan and bag groceries while we roamed the store – were cumbersome and annoying. The shopping adventure was reduced to a trial. A real disappointment. And a Giant dose of confusion in the end.

Imagine my excitement when I got a call from Pamela at Marriage Equality asking me to look over the final edit of a story I sent her a few weeks ago to be picked up by the SF Bay Times, a local gay newspaper in this week’s issue for Veterans Day. I wrote my story about how difficult it was to do my job in the Navy before DADT (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell) came into being and, well, here’s the rest of my story.