Beyond Scanning

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavor.

The Problem

If you have ever bought groceries at a large supermarket you are probably aware of the shortcomings of the bar code scanning system.

Often the posted price bears no resemblance to the scanned price. Nearly always the posted price is considerably lower. You get cheated time after time.
Often the it is hard to match up a posted price with a product. By some odd fluke, the scanned price always turns out higher than you expected when there is ambiguity.
There is no double check on the scanner. It could scan an item twice or make an error and all goes so fast it is unlikely you would catch the error.

My Proposed Solution

Give up on posted prices altogether. The retailer will like this since keeping posted prices up to date is labour intensive and a source of constant friction with the customers. Instead customers carry little RFID readers. They can check the price of any item, get comparison info, such as price per gram, and maintain a running tally of what is in the basket. To checkout, you just wheel the basket through a scanning tunnel and all the items in the basket are bulk scanned. If it does not agree with the customer’s tally, you can take corrective action.

Further the customer, at home, on the Internet, can create a shopping list, which is downloaded into the hand-held RFID unit. The unit can then beep any time the customer walks past an item on his list, and can direct him to the remaining items on the list. Retailers might not like this since shopping could to be too efficient to promote impulse buying. However, busy people might like the time saving so much they would shop only at stores that offered this service.

Your Mission

Your job is to create a prototype for this. You need to invent a universal RFID product numbering scheme, or research existing ones, build some hand held scanner prototypes (which might be laptops on carts to demonstrate the idea). You need to write the website software to let people create shopping lists. You need a database to track where various products are located. You want to design this in such a way it could interface with a variety of existing systems.

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