Safeway Tests PalmPilot Shopping

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February 05, 1999 (6:26 AM EST)

By Madeleine Acey,

Internet shopping is already obsolete, according to one British supermarket that is handing out PalmPilots and modems to its shoppers to test a direct-dial alternative.

Safeway's system provides shoppers with a personalized shopping lists on 3Com handheld computers, based on four months' shopping. With a touch screen, the customers can press a "send order" button after selecting groceries and the 14.4 kilobits per second modem that's provided with the palmtop dials in to the store's server.

The specially written PalmPilot C++ program can then either place an order or allow the shopper to access its database of 25,000 products if they want to buy something that isn't already on their list.

Safeway -- which is no longer affiliated with the American store of the same name -- says shopping over the Net is not easy and not everyone has a PC.

"Our customers don't want to log on [to the Web] every time and go through catalogs of 25,000 products," said Paula Cressey, spokeswoman for the nationwide chain.

The PalmPilots were specially modified by Symbol Technologies to incorporate a miniature barcode scanner so that shoppers could choose to restock their shelves by scanning the barcode labels on the products they already had in their kitchens, Cressey added. This function was not enabled for the trial but was an option for the future.

The PalmPilot was chosen over other options for ease of use and the graphical user interface, said Adrian Hall, Safeway IT business solutions analyst. The software could be ported to other devices in the future, including mobile phones and digital TV set-top boxes.

This, said Safeway officials, would be the future of electronic transactions -- not PC and Web-based shopping.

"We're skipping Web shopping altogether," said Cressey. "Our research has found that our customers don't have PCs."

In a fight for market share in the emerging electronic shopping business, rival chain Tesco -- which recently launched itself as an ISP and started giving away access this week -- also announced a PalmPilot-based service for home shopping. Tesco already had an Internet-based shopping service, but Safeway has rejected this model outright.

The only thing on Safeway UK's Web site is a graduate recruitment promotion.

"There are more people in the UK that have PCs with Internet access than have dogs," Tesco spokesman Russell Craig said. "We've got home shopping for phone, fax and Internet and the greatest demand is for Internet."

He agreed that the PC may not be the access device of choice in the future but said Tesco aimed to cover all bases.

Tesco planned to use the same PalmPilots with the built-in scanner but said it was also considering low cost stand-alone barcode scanners so that customers didn't have to use a list or catalog at all.

However, users would have to plug their handheld computers into an Internet-connected PC to download their orders.