Bringing Home The 33900-10020

Like pickle barrels and nickel candy, the ring of grocery-store cash registers may soon belong to nostalgia. In its place will come the soft whir and occasional beeping of electronic equipment. Seven large supermarket chains in the U.S. are quietly testing an automated pricing and check-out system that can "read" coded prices on each item, tot up the bill and do nearly everything but pack the groceries in a bag. Advocates of the system, who describe it as the biggest advance in retailing since the tin can, say that it promises big savings in both shopping time for consumers and operating costs for store owners.

Pilot Systems. The heart of the operation is a product-coding system under which each of thousands of commonly sold items is identified by a ten-digit number--33900-10020 for an 8-oz. package of Jones hickory-smoked bacon, for example. Postage-stamp-sized rectangles printed on boxes or labels by the packager carry both the product's code number and a set of light and heavy lines that allow an optical scanner set in the newfangled check-out counters to identify each item. The scanner feeds the data to a computer programmed with the store's current prices as well as other information, and the machine does the rest.

Although the pilot systems now in operation are made by several companies (among them: IBM, National Cash Register Co., Sperry Univac) and have varying capabilities, they all flash each purchase on a screen mounted at the check-out counter and produce a tape listing each item by product and price at the end of the sale. The computers keep track of which items are subject to sales taxes, to cents-off promotions, to Sunday sales bans and even to Food and Drug Administration health warnings.

They also issue trading stamps, calculate federal food-stamp payments--and maintain a bad-check memory bank.

Although some kinks remain to be worked out, supermarket operators are impressed with the system. At the check-out counter, it eliminates the chance for human error at the keys of a cash register. The computers also offer store managers a system of instant inventory control and a quick means of checking the results of sales and promotion campaigns. Finally, the system relieves stores of the chore of stamping prices on each individual item, which means that they can get by with fewer $4-an-hour grocery boys. Although the cost of installing the system can run as high as $125,000, industry analysts reckon that automated check-out can save a typical eight-lane supermarket about $40,000 a year. Some chain officials predict that 8,000 U.S. supermarkets will be using the system by 1980.

The prospect of electronic shopping has already sparked protests from the Retail Clerks International Association, which fears that automation will eliminate one in five supermarket clerking jobs. And the industry itself concedes that there is no guarantee that computer economics will mean lower prices. Says John Strubbe, a vice president with Kroger supermarkets: "To be able to say that Kellogg's Corn Flakes is going to cost 1-c- less after we put in automatic check-outs--I can't say that. There are too many other factors."

Some shoppers have been unsettled by the speed with which sales flash on and off the digital display screen at computerized counters. Says Housewife Arlene D'Agosto, who shops at an automated Pathmark store in South Plainfield, N.J.: "I feel that I have to watch more than when the girl was ringing it up." But another customer finds the system "fantastic." One day last week, she got a total purchase of 25 items tallied, paid for and packed in 99 seconds flat--half the usual time.

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