WCBS-A/New York Makes It Official, Wayne Randazzo Joins Howie Rose In Mets Radio Booth

More grocery futurism: You've heard about Amazon's Go stores, where you can walk in, grab stuff, and pay for it with an app without dealing with registers or staffers or anything. Now comes Caper, an AI-enabled shopping cart that automatically rings up your purchases: You throw your stuff in the cart, it "sees" what you took, it keeps a running total, and at the end, you pay on the cart and leave, no checkout lines necessary. It exists, it's being tested in two stores, and the only thing I can see that could be a problem is what happens when these things get stolen or rolled out of the parking lot like regular carts. (Forbes)

Trader Joe's certainly knows marketing, and so we have the store's 10th annual Customer Choice Awards, listing customers' favorite items. Number one: Mandarin Orange Chicken, a repeat winner. Top snack: Peanut butter filled pretzels. Imagine any other store getting away with this kind of free advertising. And then pick your own favorites. (San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com)

A lot of people want to be first, even if it might be a tad premature. And so we have the Stop & Shop grocery chain in the Northeast rolling out autonomous, driverless grocery stores. Delivery? No, not quite. More like electric autonomous vans fitted out with a selection of groceries you would then walk up and pick out and pay for in an app. The store comes to you. You call it up like an Uber, it rolls up, you pick your stuff, you pay, you close the door, it rolls away. There's a LOT they have to work out first, right? Autonomous vehicles are still not quite there yet, there's the matter of theft, the selection might not be what you want... but here comes the future, whether it's ready or not. (Boston Globe)