On Sun, 10 Feb 2002, cfb wrote:
> McDonalds Japan is schitzo... it's a documented fact. Just look at
> the customer loyalty program they rolled out a year or so back
> involving re-writable display cards and specialized terminals (a
> roll out that must have cost 100s of millions of yen)... all gone
> now... as if it never happened.
Were these those cards with a big silver panel on which is printed all
your information (number of points you have, number of points last time
you used the card, etc. etc.)? If so, it was probably no more than many
other shops spend per-terminal on these, and these cards seem reasonably
popular in Japan. I myself have these cards from two chains, Hub (a
chain of English-style pubs) and 北の家族 (a chain of Izakaya). (BTW,
I'd be interested in more information on how these cards work, if anybody
has a pointer to some.)
So building a loyalty program in a country in which they are
extremely popular, and using a common--if not commodity--technology
at the POS side doesn't seem odd at all. I'm rather suspecting
other reasons for the failure.
The bar code thing, well, that's a little more difficult. In the
article they say that they're going to use it "to provide easy
access to information at its shops and settle payments online."
That almost makes it sound as if it's going to be used at the shop.
But then they say that they'll "provide users with a mini scanner
to read bar codes that will allow them to jump to web pages, buy
products and access information on the web." Which makes it sound
much more like the wired CueCat that people use at home.
(Note that CueCat also has wireless keychain-fob models that will
squirt their stored data to your computer via IR after you come
home, though these are not free as the wired scanner is. Presumably
one could build a system that would squirt to the IR port on a
phone--not as good as being in the phone itself, but still better
than nothing. Come to think of it, I should be able to program my
portable scanner to squirt to a phone as well, since it already
does so to a computer.)
Anyway, I'd be really interested to see just where MacDo is going
to go with this. If anybody's getting a good deal out of the CueCat
thing, it could well be Radio Shack. Every product in their printed
catalogue now has a bar code that you can swipe, bringing you
directly to a page where you can get more information, add it to
your shopping cart, or whatever. But MacDo, dealing in rather
perishable goods, does not have catalogue shoppers, habitual web
site browsers, or any of that. I don't really understand why you
would want to buy or pay for a hamburger over the web.
(I'm thinking that the Radio Shack deal probably works like this:
CueCat agrees to supply, for free, massive quantities of CueCat
scanners to RS. [These probably cost around $2 each to manufacture
and deliver to RS] RS agrees to shoulder the cost of distributing
them to all of their shops and handing them out for free to customers.
RS also agrees to pay a reasonable sum the CueCat folks for the RS
catalogue's thousands of barcodes and the redirections into the RS
website. So CueCat gets a big, big distribution chain, and RS gets
to get its popular paper catalogue really well integrated with the
web at a discount price.)
There are certain areas in Japan, beyond catalogue shopping, where
home-based bar-code scanning could be useful. You could pay your
bills at home rather than at the combini, for instance. And certainly
businesses with loyalty programmes (again, much more common here
than in the Western world) would go for "swipe this code to get a
discount next time you come in," because the advertising readership
and demographic information they could collect would be invaluable.
(Magazine publishers would probably hate this, of course. :-))
> Bar codes on displays... kinda' like cupons on the web?
Again, loyalty programs can make the difference here. When you've
got someone registered already, and the discount comes with a simple
swipe of a barcode, the effort on the part of the consumer is much
less than the payback, and so it can catch on. Web coupons required
printing out, which is a PITA, and then you've got to carry it
until you go somewhere where you can use it.
Just to clarify, here's exactly the process I envision.
The Setup: Assume I've got my scanner, plugged it into my computer,
installed the software, and registered. Now I can pull out my Bic
Camera point card, swipe the bar code, and it knows that I'm a
member of that loyalty programme. (It turns out that this is the
only card I have, of a dozen or so, that has a barcode on it. But
for some others I can at least type in the number. For the rest,
well, the retailers will get it into gear soon enough, especially
when they get the service for free--though really in exchange for
shopping data.)
The Hit: I see an advert from MOSBurger saying that if I swipe the
code, I'll get a special offer. I swipe it, and get a web page back
saying that if I come in on any Tuesday this month and order a
hamburger and fries, I'll get a free drink. I go in, hand them my
loyalty card, and get my free drink. They sell a burger and fries
on a slow day, and find out just which magazines and newspapers
their customers are reading.
I could actually see this being really, really big in Japan, if
only enough people here had computers.
> A general purpose scanner would be cool. A specialized barcode only
> laser scanner would be stupid. Barcodes are not nearly ubiquitous as
> one might think.
What do you mean by that. I.e., where do barcodes need to be that
they aren't now, and what makes them hard to put there?
Barcodes are ubiquitous on anything sold in a shop. I can't imagine
that any medium-to-large retailer with a POS system would ever
stock something without an EAN-13 on it; the cost of dealing with
it would be just too high. And the cost of getting barcodes on to
somewhat-to-very ephermial printed matter (advertisements, loyalty
cards, etc.) is very, very low.
The really big advantage of barcodes is cheapness and reliability.
Chips that include basically everything you need to scan a dozen
or more standard types of barcodes cost less than fifty cents. A
piece of consumer hardware to scan a barcode and get it into a PC
can be produced for a couple of dollars. And it's going to be
extremely reliable; it will virtually never produce an error, and
require a rescan a reasonably small percentage of the time.
General purpose scanning, on the other hand, is a lot more expensive,
a lot less reliable, and is useful for what? I own a portable
general purpose scanner (a C-Pen, but I've also used the competing
one whose name escapes me at the moment, "Q-something"?), and I've
got to say the barcode scanning ability of it seems to offer far
more than the text scanning and OCR. (If you're in Tokyo and want
a personal demonstration of the difference in reliability and ease
between barcode scanning and generalised scanning, drop me an e-mail.)
Anyway, bar code scanners should definitely be in keitai. Just to
keep this on topic for the list. :-)
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Sun Feb 10 09:13:58 2002