Thursday, April 26, 2007

No. 0013 - Barcoded Produce

I was at the self check out one time and this man in front of me had like a bag of cilantros, potatos, beets and some other random vegetables (who knows what he was about to cook). Anyway, it took him forever to go through because he had to first chose the categories, then the sub categories and on and on. . . . Essentially, he needed assistant on each item. I think I was buying some batteries so I got out of there before he even got to the beets. Heres what I suggest. How about growing the barcode right on the vegetables? I've seen Chinese people have taped a word on the apples and a few days later, the taped part would become lighter. How about taping a barcode there next time so it can be imprinted on the fruit? I'm not sure what to do with stuff like lettuce or carrots, but I'm confident that with the advance technology and briliant scientists out there today, we can grow just about anything, even barcodes for impatient shopper such as I.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or what about injecting an RFID tag? That way you could just literally place your bag of random veggies on the counter, it would be able to tell what you had and how much, and all you would have to do is insert your credit card!

Patrick said...

But then wouldn't we be eating RFIDs all over the place? That would be pretty funny though. Imagine after having ingested a year worth of RFID and we throw ourselves across the checkout, it would read like "50 heads of lettuce, 24 potatos and 10 apples. . . . ". That just might crash the system.

Anonymous said...

Good point. Maybe it could be a sticker RFID tag. Or maybe we just need scanners, like in Star Trek.

Anonymous said...

haha...beets!