See how smart shopping carts scan and tally groceries at ShopRite
Smart shopping carts now at ShopRite in Mount Kisco. Caper Cart’s Christopher Alfano shows how it works ahead of holiday food shopping, Nov. 19, 2024.
The future is now — grocery shopping has gone high-tech at Mount Kisco’s new ShopRite, just in time for Thanksgiving. The store has introduced smart Caper Carts to the supermarket floor, offering an alternative to waiting in a check-out line to find out how the turkey and side dishes add up.
The newly opened 74,000-square-foot store has both traditional shopping carts and the high-tech Caper Carts.
If you choose one of the new smart shopping carts, powered by Instacart, it lets you keep a running price tally as you shop. Items’ costs appear on the cart’s tablet screen in the northern Westchester County store. The carts are on offer at other ShopRites, including locations in northern New Jersey.
How to use ShopRite’s new smart Caper Carts
To use one of the smart carts, find the bar code on the item you want and tap “add item” on the cart’s tablet screen, said Christopher Alfano, a brand ambassador of Caper Carts at the ShopRite.
Type in the item’s code and select the merchandise on the screen. The cart’s four sensors pick up the bar code, weigh the item, green lights come on, and the price shows up on the tablet.
It also works for produce, which have stickers with a four-digit code — go to “add item” and choose either the item’s name or the code, Alfano said.
“The whole cart is also a scale,” he said, using a dragon fruit to demonstrate. “It’s as easy as placing our dragon fruit in, and it automatically weighs it right there.”
It works in reverse, too. Take an item out of the cart and it’s removed from the list of tallied items, Alfano said.
“One of my favorite things with this cart is it connects directly to your loyalty club account. So, no longer do you have to use the app or the kiosk to clip your coupons; you do it straight from the cart,” Alfano said. “The cart will also give you a notification, so if you don’t know if there’s a digital coupon, it’ll let you know that there is one.”
At self-checkout, you don’t have to rescan everything individually, Alfano said. Instead, the cart will give you a one-time bar code. Scan the code, and everything in the cart is tallied all at once at self-checkout.