I’ve been doing this for years! My local grocery has a little scanner you can take around with you, I carry 2 wicker baskets, scan items as I fill them, and then the self checkout lane reads a code from the scanner, I tap to pay, and walk home. It’s honestly seamless.

Some giants have had handheld scanners for a decade... You just grab one as you walk in, scan and pack everything and hand it to the cashier on way out.

Grabbing a scanner at the door makes more sense otherwise they would have to be made waterproof since people take and leave their carts outside.

I worked for a company that did a demo using RFID tags. Every item had one and you just walk through a scanner when you're done shopping and it rings everything up instantly.

I'm going to assume you're in a country where they have the self checkout things which have a 'bagging area' of some sort wit a scale under it?

In the Netherlands we have selfcheckout without this weighing. You walk into the store, grab a handscanner, and as you walk through the store you can pick something up, scan it, put it in your own bag and continue. When you get yo the register, you scan some barcode on the screen of the register woth your scanner, touch your nfc bank card to the terminal, and walk out. No need to take anything out of your bag.

Sometimes they do random checks, then some employee comes over and scans a few items from your bag. But you can just let it be their problem. They'll usually put the stuff they've taken out back in again aswell.

At least in Germany, at a lot of Rewes (supermarket chain), this is absolutely a thing and very common. You can place the handheld barcode scanners in a specialised holder on the cart handle and then scan as you go, and neatly package all your stuff before going to the checkout and paying at a terminal. If even Germany has got this by now, then every other country on the planet surely does too lol.

Walmart doesn't even let you do the scan and pay thing with your phone unless you're a Plus member. Which is fucking stupid. We basically already have a scanner with the ability to pay in our pocket, and they even have systems that let you do exactly what you're asking about. But then they make you pay extra for it. Like, you're already trying not pay employees and you expect me to pay you to do what a cashier does? Fuck that and fuck you, Walmart.

Honor system wouldn't work in all places unfortunately

I heard some grocery chain was experimenting with rfid chips on all their products so you can just load up and leave and sensors at the door detect what you're carrying and charge you the appropriate amount automatically. Personally I'd rather pull up to a register and have it show me a list of what's in my cart and the total price rather than automatically charging, but otherwise it's not a bad idea.

That exists and it's really nifty. At least in France, you have them in most big brand supermarkets. The downside is that it requires a user account.

The grocery store I often go to had these barcode scanners you could borrow at the entrance and scan your stuff as you go, along with scales on which you could print a barcode sticker for the stuff you pay by weight.

Once you were done, you'd scan a QR card at the self-service checkout to upload all the stuff you scanned, then pay.

It was awesome, you could just pack as you go. Unfortunately they scrapped the project once they found out that the amount of theft was significantly higher with this system. So yeah, we can't have nice things 😒

Already exists and being used, search for "smart shopping carts"

If you pack your groceries in boxes in the cart, wouldn't that throw off the weight at the checkout?

Sam's Club does it all with a self-checkout app and cart-scanning cameras at the exit. If you only get one or two things and don't use a cart, then an associate needs to spot-scan on the way out, but otherwise it works great!

Theft, pretty much. They wanna see you empty that shopping cart before you leave.

You know what would be nice? Check out the Uniqlo checkout booths in Japan Video and imagine that tech connected to a single shopping cart that just charges your card when you walk through the door

Walmart spent millions on rfid trying to do this. Howevera cart full of razor blades would always not read something so they gave up.

as others have said what you ask for evists - but only where most people are honest enough to not cheat. Where stores don't trust everyone the cost of verification is more than any savings.

Tesco in the uk does this.

Coincidentally enough this post a few down from yours (on my feed) shows a trial for the second part of your post

We have this at my local grocery store (Meijer) down in the states. You use the grocery store’s app and scan as you go then pay at a kiosk. There’s a scale at the kiosk to weigh produce or I think there’s an app for that too. No need to weigh the whole thing. It’s called “Shop & Scan”.

S Chain in Finland offers this, you have to of course have their customer loyalty card.

Yeah, seen something like this in the UK. You take a scanner and scan everything as you shop, then just lay the bill as you exit. To begin with they even offered a discount I think. But they didn't have a weigh option, just that they'd check some carts 'at random'. My understanding was, like self checkouts, even if there's a little more theft it's more than made up for by less workers.

amazon fresh stores do something like this.

They had this at Stop & Shop for a while in the US. Don't know if that's still how it works though.

I do this with my phone at meijer. No need for a device when you're phone can scan already.

Sam's Club in America you can use their app to scan your stuff and pay. They check your receipt on the way out.

There’s at least one UK supermarket that lets you do this.

Info:

In Switzerland big super markets have this with handscanners. You can also use the Supermarkt App and scan the stuff with your smartphone. When you leave you just checkout and payment is processed automatically if you have set it up or you can pay at a terminal. Sometimes they do random checks.

We have that in one shop. It started with just a scanner and at the register you'd get random searches. By now the scale is integrated into the cart.

It sucks a bit because with the first system you could quickly scan ten items and throw them into the cart. But now you have to wait a bit after throwing something into the cart for the scale to give the ok.

They don't weigh at the end because that way you can have your shopping bags or boxes in the cart. That way the cart's weight at the beginning is registered as 0 and when you're done shopping you just have to lift your bags directly from the cart into your car. I guess that could be mitigated by having a scale at the entrance of the shop.

But for all the waiting after scanning one item it's still much nicer than having to load everything from the cart to the register and then back into the cart again.

Tesco in the UK has had handheld scanners for years, and are trialling scales.

We'll, there's Amazon go, which is actually slightly better than having to scan and check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go#%3A%7E%3Atext=Amazon+Go+is+a+chain+of+convenience%2CKingdom%2C+operated+by+the+online+retailer+Amazon.

Also Kroger did what you are recommending like 10 years ago, but it looked silly compared to Amazon go, so it didn't really stick in my area.