Well, as everyone knows in retail, you know when you go stand in the line at Walmart you
know I hate waiting in there for you know a half hour well you know the
technologies out there now to actually self checkout and sometimes lines are long
there now. But now we have come out with the technology that you can just take all your
items and come up and just scan it and it will scan everything at once. I'm here
with Christian, he's actually the owner of Uptown Cycles. He has he has a system
fully developed in his store, a bicycle shop, and the way it's done is each
of your products now has this little tag on it which looks like a regular price tag
but in reality this is an RFID chip tag and it has this little teeny chip
in here that when I was up here, when I put it on a checkout scan, it scans it
just like it would at the store if you're like scanning a barcode. Only, you
just have to kind of be in the area. A lot of a lot of what we do, especially with the
training facility, it takes takes time away from the sales floor. So, if we can, if a
customer comes in we can say, you know what, use the self checkout for an
easy transaction. That's one of the benefits that we're really seeing because
especially with coaching and the training facility, those are very time
consuming areas. And also the repair area as well takes a lot of time and so
sometimes you don't have that many that many bodies on the sales floor. And it's
great to have such an option, to actually
just go out and check yourself out. Customer comes in, they can check out if they had already
if they already have an account set up. They can pay with their account. They're out
the door. So, so you think something like this would be difficult to implement, but
in reality it's pretty easy with a couple pieces of equipment. This is like
just a regular price tag sticker, but really it happens the small little
printer like this made by Zebra you can actually put your tags in there and with
a computer program or like a little mobile device like this you can actually
just say, hey give me 12 pairs of socks and it will actually print out 12 of
these tags with a it will actually program the chip in it and everything
and put it in the database and then all Chris has to do is just go put it on the
product and hang it up on the shelf. For example how the 10 pair of socks you know,
I'll tag it if it's a particular color, way, particular size or quantity and if
I have five of them, I hit five, and it wirelessly prints it out to the back. Then I'll do
another section, you know maybe after I've done, you know, 20-30-40 products.
I'll go back and tag everything so it's very very quick and efficient for me. Before
we had this system, I would you know put everything in manually. I would take a
sticker gun and change the prices on a particular item. It's very time-consuming.
This has been a blessing
Implemented the system, and we had a customer that was
actually trying to steal like a sixty-dollar tire and he threw it into
his baby stroller that he had and while he was actually turning to go out,
the kiosk was right there. The kiosk actually picked it up, he looked at the
screen, saw that you know what I just stole that, I'm going to go around to the
back and we found the actual item in the dressing room. So we know that it
worked. You know the actual gates didn't go off because he wasn't close enough, but
the kiosk nabbed him first. But eventually the gates would have got him.
It's in Charlotte, North Carolina on West Morehead Street, just about a mile from where the Carolina
Panthers play football. Mike, think we can get out of here to go shopping?
We're not too far from Chris, we're about thirty miles northwest, actually towards the foothills of North Carolina,
in Hickory, North Carolina. That's where all this technology is based out of. And
the website? The website www.freedom shopping.com and uptowncyclecharlotte.com