Shopping Calculators

[ubermarkets]

I just thought that this was an interesting concept and so I thought I'd mention it. When shopping at the supermarket you have products that are sold in quality, weight and volume. One product will be 4kg and $3.25 while another product will be 5.3kg and $5.00. One product will be 430mL for $6.00 while another will be $13.00 a Litre. One product will be $13 for 5 while another will be $25 for 12.

Which products are cheapest????

The decision made of which product to buy needs to be quick and I know some people would appreciate having a calculator designed for dealing with this sort of problem. You'd need buttons for weight, quantity, length, price, and volume and it would need to be designed so that it would be as simple to compare products as possible.

This is just an idea I had the other day. I just thought I'd mention it because I like it.

Everywhere I shop they have the prices already broken down on the shelf tags. So much per ounce, or some similar measure. I take it for granted that information is going to be there for me.

Pete is right about that information being there but sometimes that information is misconstrued. I have noticed a few times that for the same product they might have it in different types of weight for some reason.

For example, I noticed on laundry detergent the other day that one tag listed cost per ounce while the other tag listed cost per load.

I think it is a great idea - and your marketing possibilities are endless.

[Glen Pastores]

It's a good idea, but I don't think its a good idea on its own. For example, if that's all the calculator does who will want to carry it around just in case they need to make a quality, weight, and volume calculation; how many times in your life have you ever had the need for this, honestly. Girls may carry it in their purse, but i doubt that guys would. It's a good idea but I think it would need to be combined with something else.

[f3adventure]

It's mandatory in Australia to have the price per kilo as well as the item price. It makes it easy to work out which is the best value product.

I think an even better idea to get me into a supermarket is for the supermarket to have available a beautiful blonde woman about 23 - 33 years to guide me around and 'help' with my product selections. hehehehe

Seriously:
Supermarkets will get more automated. In Germany there is an experimental supermarket that is almost entirely automated. There are still check-out-chicks and shelf-stackers but product selections are heavily assisted with electronics. Sooner or later RFID tags will accompany every product and that means you'll be at the check-out for only as long as it takes to swipe your card. With an implantable chip, just walk by the check-out with your goods and the cash register will detect the product tags and your account will be auto-debited.

By the way, there have been many types of shopping calculator introduced over the years.

[starmild]

People have already too many gadgets to carry with them. The only way for this to work would be if you could have it on the shopping cart. It should also have the possibility to read the line code - it is frustraiting trying to search for a price if there is none.

Maybe it could be so that instead of manually inserting the numbers to the calculator - you could just show it the line code and it automatically calculates the price to the sum of your shoppings. But the whole prosess should be noisless - otherwise the whole supermarket will be beeping.