Attention all box stores

If you want to do your customers a favour, help them take advantage of technology they already have to do something useful while they're in your store.

Consumers - how many times have you found yourself in a store looking at an item on display but you can't determine its price because there's no tag, neither on the product nor the shelf, and you cannot find one of those price check scanners without doing an entire circuit of the store?

Retailers - the solution is simple. Make a phone app that allows consumers to take a photo of the bar code on the item and the app queries a database based on what store they're at (which would work even better if the phone has location awareness like an iPhone). It then reports the price to the consumer.

Heck, why stop there. If you can take advantage of an app that turns a phone into a barcode scanner (apparently such apps already exist), consumers can use your own custom app to scan everything they put into their cart, which by the time they get to the till, has already totalled the purchase and all the cashier has to do is quickly verify the items in the cart. The phone could even submit the purchase with a quick verification code from the cashier to your favourite bank account or credit card. Or, a unique 3D barcode can be generated by the phone to represent the order, which is then scanned into the cashier's computer to 'pass' the order into their system. Then you pay as per normal or whatever.

This is my great idea for the day.......