My other revelation that I had at the Apple store earlier this evening is one that even made my wife do a double-take and say, “Wow – now that’s cool!”
Admittedly I can probably count the number of times I’ve been in these stores on one hand, so I’m not super familiar with their layout, but when I finally settled on my iPhone case, I caught myself saying, “Hey, wait a minute – where do I actually check out?!” as I looked around the store and realized that with the Genius Bar in the pack being entirely for tech support, they actually don’t have cash registers on the floor in these stores! Surprisingly, I asked a random employee and he proceeded to check me out right there on his iPhone, which alone was pretty darned neat, but that wasn’t the cool part…
The cool part was that before he ran the transaction, he gave me a quick, little demo of the Apple Store app that’s available as a free download, that not only allows you to schedule tech support appointments and browse Apple’s full product line using the store’s free wi-fi, but also using a new feature called EasyPay gives customers the ability to check themselves out when making simple purchases for accessories and the like, with the balance just charged to your iTunes account after scanning the barcode of each item with your phone’s camera! You obviously can’t use it for big things like computers and phones, and employees have to retrieve those from the back for you anyways, but for anything else, just scan the back of the box, click a couple of buttons, and you’re good to go!
I’m a big fan of self-checkouts at grocery stores because A) I tend to be a bit anti-social when I’m out shopping, and B) most times I feel like I can check myself out more quickly and efficiently than a human cashier who’d rather go on break or flirt with their bag boy than help me anyways, but this is even a step cooler yet! I downloaded the app as soon as I got home, and I’m definitely looking forward to giving it a try when we go back next weekend to pick out a case for Sara’s phone and run some other errands…
This is the future, and it is awesome. 