Giant Leads in Grocery Technology!

Today I visited the Giant Food at Park 97 at 7940 Crain Highway and used their "Scan It" system that allows you to scan and bag your items as you shop. I absolutely LOVE this shopping tool. It's so easy to use and makes shopping so much faster. My two favorite features are being able to see a running total of my spending while I shop and being able to bag as I go. I'm really kind of persnickety about how my groceries are bagged, and by doing it myself, I know it's done right. When I shop, I carefully place my items on the checkout belt in the order that I want them bagged, grouping all the cold/frozen items together. When I get home, I put away the refrigerated and frozen foods first (of course), so I really dislike finding that the employee has mixed them in with the other items so that I have to look through every bag to find all the cold stuff first. This system totally solves that issue for me. I've done the self-checkout before at Giant and at Superfresh, and it's okay, but I'm not crazy about it because the belt ususally gets backed up before I've finished scanning, so I have to keep stopping to bag some items, then return to scanning. This is such a step forward, I can't even tell you how much I liked it! Once I was finished, all I had to do was go to the self-checkout, run my hand-held scanner through, swipe my Giant card and my credit card and I was ready to go -- groceries already bagged and in the cart!

I didn't purchase any produce with the system today, so I'll have to see how well it works with that, but I did purchase a few items from the service deli and some fresh bagels, and it was a breeze. The glass doors of the bagel bins have bar-coded stickers to scan with the hand-held, so you can either scan the pre-made label for a dozen bagels, if that's how many you're purchasing or, you can scan it once for each bagel if you're buying fewer. I'm hoping the produce works the same way.... but I'm kind of wondering about the items sold by the pound. I'll be going back later this week or the first of next week, so I'll give an update and post some photos with it.