Sun, May 04, 2003 page11

• Futuristic supermarket unveiled

  SMART SQUASH The German retailer Metro AG Hi-tech features include Veggie-Vision, radio-wave transmitting shopping carts and a checkout line without a queue

  • AP
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  German retail giant Metro AG on Monday unveiled what it thinks is the high-tech supermarket of the future -- with wireless express checkout, smart shelves that alert staff to expired cream cheese and a "VeggieVision" produce scale that sorts pears from peaches with a digital camera.

  Metro's Extra supermarket in Rheinberg, a town of low brick houses in western Germany, relies on wireless networks and radio-controlled smart tags to track goods and customers' purchasing habits. The heavy use of wireless equipment, in combination with older technology such as bar codes, is an attempt to find out what will cut costs and attract customers over the next five to 10 years.

  "We are just at the beginning of the technological modernization of retailing," Metro CEO Hans-Joachim Koerber said. "The new technologies will substantially contribute to change in our current picture of the retailing process."

  So Metro bosses can keep track of the experiment's progress, the store near the Dutch border is located just 50km north of the company's Dusseldorf headquarters.

  Customers -- like the pack of journalists who got a preview Monday along with supermodel Claudia Schiffer, who the company says hails from Rheinberg -- can cruise the aisles with a touchscreen on their shopping carts.

  Shoppers effectively log into the system by scanning a customer ID card into the touchscreen. The device lets them scan bar-coded goods as they toss them in the cart, then sends the prices to checkout by radio signals through the wireless network.

  That means there's no time-consuming scanning at the checkout: The cashier just flashes the total and takes your money. For repeat customers, the touchscreen fishes up their last visit from the back-room server and proposes it as a shopping list.

  By calling up a store map on the touchscreen, customers can get directions to items they want to buy . Schiffer, for instance, tracked down the children's DVD "The Little Polar Bear," a package of stew beef and a matching wine.

  "A red wine? Yes, a red wine would be nice," she said.

  Other innovations in the store, which opens to the public Tuesday, are the wireless-controlled price displays on shelves that can be instantly updated by remote. There's also the IBM-developed vegetable scale designed to recognize fruit and print out the price sticker.

  Perhaps the key feature is smart tags, or RFID chips -- short for radio frequency identification -- that broadcast data for several meters, enabling receiver-equipped smart shelves or handheld scanners to keep of what's in the store.

  Thus, the store alerts staff to outdated products or when the milk is running low. More enticingly, RFID offers retailers the chance to make the costly, time-consuming job of taking inventory by hand simply go away.

  Yet there are still hurdles before the glitch-free shopping of the future arrives.

  The scale, dubbed ``VeggieVision'' by developers, can't always distinguish close calls -- say, between different types of tomatoes -- and invites the customer to complete the choice. It won't catch on if the customer prints a wrong price tag.

  More important, only a few products have RFID tags, not enough to make their use at checkout worthwhile. Later it's hoped that the tags will enable customers to simply breeze out and have the bill appear later on their credit card.

  Right now, RFID only tracks goods at the box and pallet level -- useful, but not something customers will see.

  Metro, which has more than 2,300 stores in 26 countries, says it's paying supplier Philips Electronics US$0.50 to US$1 for the chips -- too much to tack on to low-priced items such as a 25-cent cup of yogurt. Only when the price comes down -- to, say, 3 cents a chip in the coming years, with order volumes in the hundreds of millions or billions _ could RFID show up in the dairy section.

  Other big retailers are also moving ahead on technology that many believe will transform retailing within a couple of years.

  US giant Wal-Mart and Britain's Tesco, along with consumer product companies such as Procter & Gamble and Gillette, are experimenting with RFID technology. Gillette has agreed to buy 500 million RFID chips from California-based Alien Technologies.

  The tags will have to overcome criticism that they could be used for surveillance after the customer leaves the store -- for instance, by thieves scanning trash to find goods worth stealing.

  Metro says its policy will be to turn the chips off automatically as the customer leaves the store.
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