The thought of waiting in the long queue at a retail mall makes us all cringe. Many a times it takes more time for billing than for shopping for the family! With malls becoming the favorite weekend retreat for more and more people, the problem is only going to get worse.
Here's a thought...
Two things happen at the billing counter -
1. Computing the total bill
2. Payment
People come with basket or at times baskets full of goods. Obviously it takes a while to scan all of them and compute the bill. How about modeling a shopping cart on the lines of an online shopping cart? Make it intelligent so that it can compute the bill as the goods are added to or removed from it! All that is left to be done at the counter is the payment, which takes relatively lesser time.
It's feasibility and design would require some serious pondering but hey! it's a thought! :)
-Ashish.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
I think that the shopping cart you mention is a good idea...but hey, think about the economy!!! A shopping mall has about a 100 or more carts/baskets, and designing all carts like this would increase the production costs by a whopping amount, in which case, the management may just increase the costs of its items, which would be undesirable, right??!! :) Again, the billing is done one person at a time, while if you design a smart-cart, there will be hundreds of transactions going on in the mall any given minute, which may bring a load on the centralised software, and which will again be a huge responsibility for the mall's management. In this case, you need a really strong software support system. Well, why don't you present this idea to your IBM head. Maybe you guys can come with a great solution to it!! ;) So, in my opinion, the idea is good, but maybe it will take a lot of time to be actually implemented...!!!
- Abhishek...
Post a Comment