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nairaland.net • View topic - Homemade supermarket checkout system

Homemade supermarket checkout system

Homemade supermarket checkout system

Postby Richard Akindele » Sat Jul 22, 2006 6:47 pm

About 3 years ago, I created a checkin/checkout system for a video store.

What does it do?

It has several dozen functions, but the function I want to talk about here is it's ability to create barcodes that hold information.

Without boring you with the details, I know you have noticed in supermarkets or grocery stores that each item has a barcode on it.

When a customer is finished shopping, the checkout is as easy as using a laser barcode scanner to scan the barcode on the item, and the price is automatically displayed on the screen. Once all items have been scanned, the total price is displayed, and payment is then effected by the customer.

This system saves a lot of time, and eliminates arithmetic errors. It also updates the store's inventory level, plus whatever else you want it to calculate.

The downside to this system is that it's expensive to purchase a ready-made solution, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. Furthermore, you must pay technicians a lot of money to fix it if it ever breaks.

As we know, supermarkets in Nigeria may not be able to afford such huge cost required to bring this kind of technology to fruition. Therefore, most stores continue to do things manually.

Being the practical thinker that I am, I've designed a similar system that will cost as little as $110 to implement.

The total actual cost would depend on how many checkout points the store needs. So, let's say a store has 5 checkout points, the total cost would just be $100 * 5 = $550.

That is incredibly low cost for computerizing a store. The cost is this low because the programming is done using Linux, PHP, MySQL, Apache, and other open source softwares.

I would love to see Nigeria move forward. And we can start by taking advantage of free open source software that are totally free to use. The possibilities of what I just detailed above are endless, only limited by one's imagination as to what else can be created with it.

If we begin to think practically in Nigeria, we don't need to award multi-million dollar contracts, when in reality our goal can be achieved for a few hundred dollars in some cases. Furthermore, instead of these contracts going to foreign entities, we could have Nigerians create it. Give those graduates currently walking the streets something to do.

As time goes on, knowledge gained from one project becomes useful in future projects. Before you know it, Nigeria has become a tech giant like China, able to manufacture our own things, and perhaps even export to other places.

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