Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Personal Digital Shopping Assistant

To tell you how to shop to save money, time and to avoid certain foods or ingredients
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People have all sorts of motives when they shop at the supermarket. Some may want to lose weight, some want to save money but still eat healthy, some may have food allergies or intolerances and need to avoid certain ingredients like wheat in my case. Also they want to know what items are on special?

To focus on the essentials and save time and money you need an advise of a personal trainer.

Enter the Personal Digital Shopping Assistant gadget. PDSA for short, a PDA with scanner and required software customisable to individual shopper of family needs.

This PDSA would be available for you when you enter the supermarket. You would need to swipe your loyalty card to pick one up from a rack and activate it. You return it at he checkout and it resets itself for the next customer to use. This PDSA gadget would know your shopping preferences and you can program it to economy, or healthy food mode.

If you pick and scan an item which has forbidden ingredients, in my case wheat included as thickener in the sauce, the alarm will beep and I can remove the offending food item. Then the PDSA would recommend alternative wheat free item like wheat free soy sauce!

In economy mode this PDSA would just tell you the cheapest options like white bread, Coke, frozen pizza etc.

Slimmer mode would beep on all those previous Economy mode options.

This PDSA would include locator system similarities ar to GPS. Because GPS does not work indoors there needs to be transmitters, possibly bluetooth ones to guide you to the locations of the required items.

You could do your shopping list at home and then save time at the supermarket as you get guide to the items by the locator feature.

People who are not computer literate could hire the services of a real shopping assistant who works for the supermarket and would use the PSDA gadget for them.

Pellepeloton, Mar 09 2008

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       Nice. (You don't need GPS - just show the customer a map of the store with a star showing the location of the product in question)   

       Having said that, I think neither saving you money nor shortening your visit are in the best interests of most supermarkets.
phoenix, Mar 10 2008
  

       Can you not simply read the ingredients and look at the price?
angel, Mar 10 2008
  

       I hate reading that small print where the ingredients are mentioned. The flickering fluorescent lights make this quite difficult.
Pellepeloton, Mar 17 2008
  
      
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