The Carrefour hypermarket in Villeneuve-La-Garenne, near Paris, since last April is a veritable laboratory in which the French retailer is testing the supermarket of the future. At the heart of it all is an App, C-où, which provides access to a number of innovations such as the location of the items on your shopping list in the store and identification of the shortest route to do your shopping.
This is made possible by the electronic labels with NCF technology. Now C-où can also be connected to smart watches, for now only the Samsung Gear S (but in the coming months it will also be enabled for other Android smart watches), where you can also upload your loyalty card for immediate access to the checkout tills. The partners of the operation are Publicis Shopper and the French start-up Think&Go.
The first tests were carried out in December, and now the technology is available to all customers with the smart watch mentioned above. According to the monthly magazine Linéaire, there are still very few customers using these advanced features. But in the technology field, the acquisition of new technologies is proceeding at leaps and bounds and not being part of it can be very painful, while the early adopters will be able to secure at least an initial competitive advantage not to be sneezed at.
