If you’re like me and can’t always find that specific pasta sauce, there’s a smart grocery cart that can find it for you. Instacart’s Caper Cart, which has a touch screen and payment terminal on the front where you would normally sit your kids down or play Jenga with your products, now has a new store map system to help you navigate to where you are Products you’re looking for, items for sale in – and even pickups sent to you that can save you money. And there are ads on it too.
Caper Carts has been operating on a limited basis in select grocery stores for years. When you put products in, the shopping cart automatically counts them on the screen (except for certain types of products) thanks to the multiple cameras, sensors, and scales built into the shopping cart. One of the big selling points of Caper Cart is that you can import your shopping list from the Instacart app by scanning the QR code on the cart, and then check out from the cart without waiting in line.
In a demo by Caper Cart co-founder Ahmed Beshry, he showed us a new “gamification” feature: when you add one item to your cart, it can show you the location of a second item. You can grab this item to unlock more discounts. The map on the cart shows me a dotted trajectory of where to go next, and as the cart moves, the map keeps updating its real-time location – a bit like when I’m walking to the gym Pokémon Go.
The new instant map on Caper’s shopping cart appears to be more useful than the aisle letters and numbers the cart previously offered. But how does the shopping cart know where it is? I asked if it uses special beacons or millimeter-wave positioning, but Beshri said the company couldn’t share how the tracking works. He did say that they created a 3D map of the store’s interior, a bit like the process of a robot vacuum mapping your apartment.
The shopping cart also lets you go on a “treasure hunt” to find limited-time offers on items on the map. and immerse you in the entire digital on-site shopping cart experience in a world dominated by Instacart deliver For groceries, the shopping cart will reward you with points for repeat visits through “Continuous Shopping”.
Sometimes, you do need to dip your chips—the cart will happily tell you they come together—but other times, you don’t need or want to be told to pick up a specific company’s dip. As much as I want to help find pasta sauces that are on sale, getting bogged down in the recommendations and ads generated by a shopping cart can be overwhelming.
Still, I’d love to try a future shopping cart that could figure out what I’m putting in it, where to find the items on my list, give me instant coupons, and save me the hassle of waiting in line at a self-checkout line Payment.
In fact finding a cart like this might be a treasure hunt in itself. While the company said it had “tripled our Caper Cart footprint” in the past six months and would soon have “thousands” of them, it didn’t specify where they could be found. Markets worth watching include Bristol Farms, Fairway Market, The Fresh Grocer, Geissler’s Supermarket, Kroger, McKeever’s Market & Eatery, Price Chopper, Schnucks and ShopRite in the United States, as well as Aldi in Austria.
