Economics and Giant Eagle

Christopher Briem has questions about Giant Eagle’s Fuelperks program.

This reminds me to comment on G'Eagle’s Personal Shopper system. We ran into this the last time we went into the grocery store: it extends the self-service check-out system to a wand that you carry around the store with you. Scan items as you pick them up, bag them in your cart, and when it’s time to leave the system already knows your total and all you have to do is pay.

It’s a nice idea, but I see a few flaws:

On the plus side, it removes the annoying “place item in bagging area” loop in the self-service checkout systems.

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