No More Bottled Water in T.O.; Pay 5 Cents for a Bag

While this is a technology blog by definition, I couldn't help but discuss the City Council's recent decisions to ban bottled water in Toronto, and to charge grocery shoppers $0.05 for plastic shopping bags. Are these good steps toward a better, more environmentally-friendly society?

Let's look at the water issue first. Before you bottled water-aholics go nuts, you will still be able to buy bottled water by the case or individually at grocery stores and some other locations. Where you won't be able to purchase it is in city facilities. This mean concession stands, vending machines, school cafeterias, subway shops, convention centres, etc.: essentially any spot owned by the city. It'll take 3 years for the ban to come into full effect as the city works to ensure that tap water is available wherever the ability to buy bottled water is removed.

"Bottled water's 15-minutes are up," says Joe Cressy, Campaigns Co-ordinator for the Polaris Institute. "The marketing scam is out of the closet, and it's time to go back to the tap."

I'll be the first to admit that I buy bottled water all the time. Will taking it out of city facilities help, though? People that go to the gym need something to hold their water; but they could just re-use their own bottle, filled up with tap water. True, a group gathering for a sales meeting in a convention centre don't want to raise their hands and head out to take a drink from the fountain whenever they're thirsty either. But why not have a jug of tap water and glasses/cups available to attendees? Ironically enough, a Toronto Star report cites one Councilor as stating that a water ban in theatres like the Sony Centre could force workers to give away water in plastic cups. How is that helping the environment if we're still using plastic?

(As an aside, if you're a fan of the flavoured bottle water concoctions like I am, these are not included with the ban. "Toronto City Staff defined bottled water as water that is bottled and re-sold without added flavouring," Cressy tells me. "Though," he adds, "we are continuing to liaise with the city to strengthen this definition to include flavoured water."

Now, what about the bags? Grocery stores like Price Chopper have been charging a nickel per bag for some time now. But we'll see this in every store starting June 1, 2009. Is this fair? The city calls plastic bags "throwaway" items. I don't know about you, but I often save the bags and re-use them for other purposes: transporting stuff from one place to another, accumulating garbage if I've run out of dedicated garbage bags, etc. If I use one to bring something to work, for instance, I'll often stuff the bag into a drawer in our office kitchen where someone else might pick it up one day and use it once again for another purpose. I don't see plastic bags as throwaway at all! In fact, I probably use them more than I'd use a cloth bag! So why am I paying for the supposed actions of others?

On the other side of the fence, though, an extra 50-cents per shopping trip (assuming you'd use about 10 bags) isn't a major concern. And if it will help the environment in any way, so be it. The LCBO has already gotten rid of all plastic bags, only offering free paper bags, or cloth bags for $0.05 each. It's inconvenient when I have to lug a couple bottles of wine held to my chest instead of hanging from my fingers in plastic. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge deal.

BUT: the main concern is where will that money go?

High-Tech Grocery Shopping

When you think of the list of after-work activities that fall under the theme of "high-tech", grocery shopping is probably last on your list, right? Wrong. A Canadian company is helping a U.S. grocer make shopping a technology-infused experience through functions like tracking shopping behaviour, making recommendations, and, probably the most appealing feature, instantly scanning items so there's no loading and unloading of products or long line-ups. Sounds like heaven, doesn't it?

Called Concierge, the system was developed by Toronto, ON-based Springboard Retail Networks Inc., and will be available on 125 shopping carts in the Bloom grocery store in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Shoppers simply boot up a PC on the cart itself upon arrival, then activate functions via the touch-screen interface. Not sure which aisle carries canned peas? The system will guide you there. Forget the name of that spice needed for your husband's favourite chicken dish? You can pull up recipes and meal-planning suggestions. Can't remember if you have any eggs left at home? The system will track your shopping behaviour over time, then make recommendations based on prior purchases or even based on what you've already picked up. All of your purchases and data is stored via a customer loyalty card, which is scanned via the system once you've got the cart rolling. This same card is used at check-out as well.

Of course there are some potential Big Brother-esque drawbacks. For one, you can expect to receive targeted advertising based on prior purchases. But then again, this might actually come in handy during your visit. Of course the advertising, as well as the complementary recommendations, can also lead to you spending more on groceries than originally planned. I already find that going to pick up a "few things" is virtually impossible to accomplish, so when there's a computer in my ear suggesting even more, my grocery bills would likely skyrocket! And then of course, there's the collection of customer data. The retailer will track information like stats, buying habits, lifestyle, and times you visit the store. While this is helpful when looked at on a large scale and taking all customer data into account, some might frown upon having a store know more about them then they'd like.

Aside from the Big Brother issues, the technology also poses another question: you don't have to unload items on a conveyer belt to scan, but then how do they get into bags? Are you supposed to bag items yourself? Does a sales clerk bag them for you? Either way, wouldn't this lead to back-ups at the check out anyway? After all, I doubt anyone will load their items, one at a time, into the trunk of a car!

With that said, it is still a pretty darned cool system, and really shows the potential of technology to help make the shopping experience quicker, more interactive, and most important, helpful to the everyday consumer. And for retailers, the sophisticated shopping experience will undoubtedly result in more items being sold. So it's really a win-win for everyone.

RFID: Tag, You're It!

Imagine walking through the grocery store, filling up your buggy with a week’s worth of goodies, then simply pushing the buggy over a sensor and voila: your total pops up on-screen instantly. Pull out your debit or credit card, punch in the digits, and off you go. No nasty line-ups. No price-checks. Is this possible? Sure it is. Ever heard of RFID?

RFID stands for radio frequency identification, and is essentially the future of bar-coding. Each RFID “tag” contains a microchip and tiny radio antenna that can be attached to products to transmit a unique, identifying number to an electronic reader. This reader in turn links to a computer database where information about the item is stored. There’s no doubt that RFID offers many advantages over typical bar-coding. It does not require line-of-sight in order to scan an item; multiple items can be scanned at a time; and information can be read, written, and stored digitally.

RFID can mean greater convenience for consumers at the check-out, but it also has advantages for businesses. Think of RFID as a virtual consultant that can analyze business practices, than advise what can be done differently in order to better save time, money, and resources. If you can account for every pallet of product, or even each individual item, at all times throughout the supply chain, imagine how easy it would be to pinpoint where improvements can be made! Is your distributer taking too long to deliver product? Is inventory not being properly recorded? Is staff taking too long to find the items they need? In some of Hewlett-Packard's implementations of RFID, the company found that staff spent 1/3 less time simply looking for things they couldn’t find.

An RFID pilot was conducted recently in Canada’s grocery industry, and the results were promising. The grocer was able to track where each box of product was at any given time, and understand inefficiencies in the process. For instance, product was ordered when inventory was already in stock; boxes were taken off pallets and put right onto the floor; and items weren’t being shelved, even when they were available. A recall was simulated during the pilot, and it took the system just five minutes to locate where every single box of that particular product went: this process would typically have taken days!

“There is no system today that allows you to get such a granular level of data and feedback,” explained Shai Verma, Director of RFID at IBM Canada, during a summary of the pilot at the 2007 Wireless and Mobile Expo in Toronto. “[RFID] decreased out of stock issues to zero.”

Verma also gave some great real-world examples of RFID implementation: the Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls, an indoor water park, uses RFID bracelets in place of hotel room keys; while Pfizer Pharmaceutical Co. has equipped every bottle of Viagra with an RFID tag to confirm its authenticity.

Of course, there’s still a lot of work to be done in order to fully deploy RFID. For one, it is highly expensive. Who will incur the costs of each tag? The manufacturer? Distributer? Retailer? Will the price of products be increased to compensate for the cost of tracking them? Also, what level of RFID is necessary to each business? Do you really need to tag every single item in a box? Each box? Or each pallet of boxes? How sophisticated a system does one need? Is theft a major concern, or a minor one? Does one use passive RFID, which can only track within a limited distance; or active, which can track a product through much farther distances? These are all questions that need to be answered by all parties involved in order for companies to confidently take the leap toward RFID.

“Eventually, the potential of RFID will be realized,” said Verma. He predicts that 2009 will be the year of RFID.

Even so, future RFID developments are already in the works. According to Victor Garcia, CTO at HP, the company is working on what it deems to be “second generation” RFID. Called Memory Spot, this 1 x 1 mm chip will have a CPU built right into it that can store up to 2 MB of data, and will be 15,000 times faster than current chips. Each chip could essentially store a product’s “DNA”, including things like set-up videos, photos, schematics, and specifications.

It sounds like it’s straight out of a movie, but believe it or not, technologies like RFID are the way of the future.