The future is in aisle five.
Artificial intelligence-powered smart carts are rolling out in Big Apple supermarkets — and they do practically everything except cook the food.
Instacart’s Caper Carts use AI to identify items, their price and the weight of produce — and allow shoppers to check out stress-free with a click on a touch screen.
“2024 is the new 2050,” one TikTok user, @em.ly.x titled a Feb. 8 video in which she uses a Caper Cart at a ShopRite store.
The carts — which are in a Fairway Market in Kips Bay and a handful of ShopRites on Staten Island in New Jersey — may also save consumers a buck or two.
If a customer spends $35 or more, when they checkout, the touch screen prompts them to spin a wheel that lands them $2, $5 or $10 off their entire purchase.
And if the cart user is part of Fairway’s membership program, they receive more markdowns.
“I like the discounts…Two times I got $10 off – that’s pretty good,” she said.
“Here’s the funny thing: I would never go to self-checkout. But if they’re going to give me an incentive, and I’m able to get money off doing it, then why not?” said Tudor City resident T. Cat Ford, who treks 11 blocks to use the carts at Fairway. “The deal is just too good.”
“The other good thing about it is you see what you’re spending immediately” on the touch screen, she added.
Fairway shopper Geraldine Hoylie also raved about the savings.
The tech, which rolled out at Fairway in October, still has some glitches — like Hoylie’s cart, which didn’t automatically detect some of the items she’d put in it.
And Caper Carts are heavier than their stone-age counterparts, Hoylie added.
“Turning it around is hard…They should just get a lighter one,” she said.
They also cost more. The hi-tech carts can reportedly fetch up to $10,000 — about 100 times the price of basic metal carts.
Hoylie’s experience with the Caper Carts “isn’t ideal,” an Instacart spokesperson said.
“[We] definitely want to acknowledge that this is a new technology that a lot of customers probably haven’t used before…and there are folks on the ground for when there are issues,” the spokesperson said.
Customers at ShopRite and Fairway Markets still have to check out the traditional way because Wakefern Food Corporation, which owns the grocery store brands, didn’t want card readers on its Caper Carts, according to the Instacart spokesperson.
Soon, however, consumers won’t have to ask which aisle the milk is in, as the cutting-edge carts will offer a map of the grocery store — as well as recipe recommendations based on the items in them, the spokesperson said.
