I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go.
I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.
> I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores.
Scan-as-you-shop has been around for at least a decade at this point I think, at least in some parts of the world. ICA (supermarket in Sweden) been doing it for as long as I can remember, and I came across this image of the scanner being used at the store on Mediawiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self_checkout_scanne... (Image uploaded 2011)
Surely this exists elsewhere too, or been judged to only work in certain contexts (like a high-trust environment like Sweden) and won't be the next realistic step.
Jup it has been available for a very long time in the Netherlands as well.
When I moved to the UK, what surprised me is that Tesco self check out is so much more cumbersome. It weighs your stuff, stops working when something isn't exactly the right weight. Super annoying to use if you're used to the system used in Sweden and The Netherlands. But that was in stores in the middle of central London, it may be very different in more suburban "big" stores which is where it was first rolled out in NL as well.
I'm not a fan of the data tracking that I know those loyalty programs are for, but at least in the US most stores overcharge you if you don't use them (they present it as giving a "discount" if you use them but really you are just getting the fair price denied to non-members) so you would need to have deep pockets to resist them out of principle.
The latest evolution in these are really devious: A shelf tag advertises a price in large print: $7.99 with smaller print "with digital coupon" And then underneath, in the color usually used to show the "non-sale price," you see "$12.99." A lot of people just glance at the tag which looks a lot like the normal 'sale price' tag and thinks they're paying $8. Of course, you have to get in the sluggish, stupid app, and best case scenario scan the tag or the item and get to the right part of the app to "Clip" the coupon. Assuming you can get a good enough signal in that part of the store, and that you haven't become logged out of the app... etc. etc. And assuming you don't make a mental note to clip it in a minute when you get out of this crowded aisle and then forget.
I think they just really want to display one price and charge a much higher one to most people.
In my part of the US, anyway, there are several grocery stores that don't use loyalty cards at all, so you can avoid the extortion by shopping at those.
apps are a new thing. before, when it was just a phone number, 867-5309 in the us would usually work to get the discount while being usefully trackable
You maybe haven't actually spent any time in Sweden and compared to how people act towards each other there compared to other countries? Or, you haven't spent enough time in other countries than Sweden, making it hard to compare.
I lived there for my first 20 years, and have since lived in Spain. The amount of trust between people in the Nordics is definitely higher than most other places in the world.
Yeah, I remember it as a kid. But it surprised me when they brought it back because people rarely used it. I still don't really get the point of it tbh, scanning items as you pick them up just spreads out the faff of scanning things and slows people down in the aisles.
Yes. In Switzerland Migros you have this as well, at least in the bigger ones. But they also added scanning with the phone. So you don't need a special scanner, just your phone.
One of the "perks" of my Walmart+ membership is scan-as-you-go. I think I've used it twice. Both times, I only had a few things and the store was packed solid with spring breakers. It was a decent experience but I still like the normal self-checkout the best.
So does Walmart+ (the membership program which also gives a better deal for home delivery). I am curious whether this is going to stay or not, now that in some Walmarts the self-checkouts (where you're still obliged to stop and scan a code to complete checkout) aren't open normally.
I see a couple people using it at the shops near me in the UK (but it's not that popular here either). It's pretty universally available in the bigger shops, but rare in the little metro shops. I really like just slinging my bag in the trolley and running around the store with a scanner. It's dramatically easier than unpacking a trolley for self-checkout or the old school checkouts. It's annoying when there are security tagged items though, because it defeats the purpose of the self scanning.
> We've had that in France for years, and noone uses that as far as I can tell.
Which part of France are you in? Where I am, Paris suburbs, I see it used all the time in Carrefour.
There is a learning curve, which I think inhibits wider usage. I used it a couple of times, and every time I forgot to scan stuff, or forgot whether I scanned stuff, and had to go over the last scans to check.
Yes, same in the UK. Most stores have scan as you shop, but most people do self checkout. I get the impression scan as you shop is seen as being a bit prissy.
As a German it is always a culture shock to see how popular self checkout is in the UK, even though I see it used more often recently in Germany too. I think Germany is about a decade behind...
There's a simple formula that makes you chose it: they keep as few manned checkouts open as possible, as long as the wait for the manned checkouts is inconvenient enough the majority of people will use the self-checkouts.
Wait until you see how popular it is in the US! I can't remember the last time I saw someone use a manned checkout line; my local grocery store has 1 manned lane and 12 self checkout lanes, and the manned one is almost always empty.
I actually prefer manned check-out. It tends to be much faster. The checkout people tend to be wicked fast at swiping groceries in front of those scanners, much faster than I can dig into the cart, find something, fumble around scanning it, then place it in that little post-scan cubbie---ughhhhh. And manned checkout is already parallelized: Next customer queues up groceries while current customer is being serviced.
> 1 manned lane and 12 self checkout lanes, and the manned one is almost always empty
its empty because it’s considered rude to burden the poorly paid checkout person when you can self-service. Once all of the self-service lanes are occupied, the sentiment shifts and customers uneasily queue up in the manned lane, frantically watching if the self-service lane clears up so they can jump out of the manned lane.
One of those freak cases in behavioral econ where the causality is very straightforward and explicit.
I've certainly observed what looks like that kind of behavior, but I don't personally feel rude at all for using the services of a cashier.
In my own shopping, I just use whatever seems likely to be fastest or less hassle -- for me.
If I've got a bunch of stuff, I'm heading to the cashier because they're better-equipped to handle a volume of stuff than I am at self-checkout.
But if it's just a couple of small items, then the self-checkout seems fastest: Scan, plonk, scan, plonk, invoke the incantation so that it can take my money[1], and pay it.
(Unless one of those small items involves something like beer or something else requiring an ID check, wherein: It's back to the cashier.)
[1]: In my neck of the woods, Wal-Mart gets this best, with as few as one button-pushes required to pay and leave (and there was a time when it was zero button pushes to use a debit card at self-checkout there). Dollar General gets it worst, requiring at least 8 button pushes (with three different input methods! it requires input on two different touchscreens and one physical keypad) to pay them and get on my way.
It's also a step towards individualized pricing, which many people, myself included, absolutely hate. This can be done with self-checkouts but it'll work much better with handheld scanners. Normal price: 3x, member price:2x, individualized price: scan to find out.
Big chains plan to gamblify the prices in the next few years using their "member cards" points, some chains are already up to this with specific penetration targets before they move forward. And this is not insider knowledge they're upfront about it.
We have it in Germany for years too (in densely populated areas) and my subjective impression is that next to none was using it for a long time but that it's picking up slowly.
For one thing I think these things take years for broad acceptance and for another the current scanners with their bright and large displays are just what was needed to make it attractive for the young and elderly.
Give a retailer a large display, and they will fill it with ads, with the important info in tiny type. Or even a small display. I've seen user-facing credit card terminals where the small screen is 3/4 ads, 1/4 transaction.
If they'd just put up "Place card against screen here" marker that was 1) where the antenna is, and 2) fully synchronized with when the system is ready for a card read...
Similar in my area (in the US). We've had scan-and-go at the local grocery/everything store for many years, but I really don't see that many people actually using it.
Because the trust level is under zero. In France you have to put items one by one and the weight of your shopping bag has to add up before you can scan the next article. It's the prison feeling with the speed of an 90 year old in any other country's self checkout. 0/10 would not recommend.
Yeah that's basically the same issue. I do think the self scanning is even worse than the self checkout because at least at the self checkout you scan everything once at the end when you're done.
The fact that you have to remember to scan every time you put anything in your basket is just worse for the mental load I find.
If manned checkout is a dishwasher and self-checkout is handwashing dishes in the sink after the meal; scan-as-you-shop is eating next to a little basin where you wash each utensil as soon as you're done using it, before you're allowed to return to the meal.
The 'little basin' is apt because the quality/usefulness of equipment is a huge part of why it always sucks. I used a scan/pay/go system in what seemed to be a trial rollout at a major supermarket. They used your choice of a handheld scanner that lagged tremendously compared to a real scanner gun, or a smartphone app (which of course is laggy AND clunky, since you have to keep unlocking your phone and tapping some button, and waiting for it to register)... I pretty much hated it. I only used it while COVID was a big deal. They ended up pulling it and not rolling it out.
I don’t know if it’s really unpopular, but it’s only used at self checkout in Decathlon which is a chain of supermarkets selling sports equipment and clothes.
> I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.
Isn't that basically what Amazon had claimed they were doing here, except apparently maybe they weren't?
It always seemed so needlessly complex, relative to well-established RFID tech -- Uniqlo can count the number and type of garments in a pile in a big bucket, and compute an invoice from that.
Even if you couldn't do this at the exit, seems like it would have been a far easier lift to incorporate the same idea into shopping carts or baskets all along.
The cost-per-unit on RFID product tags (EPCs) has tended to limit them to products with a relatively high margin and a relatively high theft potential---clothing being the most obvious example and the most common application of EPCs, with retailers all the way down to WalMart using them for apparel.
You'll note that WalMart doesn't even use the EPCs at POS, which is telling: for most retailers, the main advantage of EPCs is far more actionable alarms at the exit. So they're limited to items where loss rates make the added cost worth it.
The problem is that the grocery industry has notoriously low margins, and the unit price of EPC tags can be the entire margin on a lot of products. On the one hand, Amazon may have been trying to work around the need for higher-cost tags to roll out this kind of automation. On the other hand, I have heard anecdotally that Amazon Fresh pricing was relatively high, so maybe EPCs would have been a wiser use of their extra revenue.
Amazon Fresh was definitely not the cheapest option. It was on par with Whole Foods for groceries, IME.
But that said, interesting point. Didn't know the cost of an RFID tag was that high -- after all, Uniqlo is putting them on some pretty cheap clothing items!
Rfid tags are really cheap, some sellers advertise prices as low as 3c per tag but realistically 10c is probably the cost of a finished product (print, glue, maybe extra protection of the plastic)
That's the problem though - $0.05 is a LOT to a grocer, that's all they keep on a lot of products. Barcodes are free since they mostly go on labels that are being printed anyway. They could push for source tagging, but the vendor would pass on the cost, and grocery is a very price sensitive industry.
For apparel, on the other hand, source tagging is common - even before EPC on higher end goods, Calvin Klein used to sew magnetostriction tags into clothing. Apparel just has so much more price elasticity and loss prevention is a huge part of that industry. Tools are another industry where EPC and source tagging are common, once again, high dollar items with a lot of theft.
Albert Heijn does this in the Netherlands, tied to your loyalty card. You can even import your shopping list and show it on the little hand scanners. At the end, you scan your loyalty card and it shows up on the self checkout.
I think it’s great, I get to go around the shop with a little laser gun.
An even nicer thing about the Albert Heijn self checkout is that I can use my own phone from start to finish. Connect to store wifi, scan items using their app (using the phone camera), pay with my phone (contactless payments) on the self checkout and use my phone to scan an exit barcode at the turnstile. My visits to the store usually last only a few minutes and I don't mind popping in multiple times a week.
Yes it's great. Put everything straight in your bag, no packing at the end.
The only thing I don't like is that they have added the option to the machines to scan all your things there instead of using the portable scanner. Which in my area has resulted in queues at the self checkout... Which used to be very quick when it was only used for the portable scanners.
Scanning with your phone camera sucks its very slow and scanning as you pass the anti theft barriers normalizes running the barriers which will make catching thieves basically impossible. It also runs contra to shoppers expectations. Raises the question of charging the wrong person when multiple phones are nearby as when multiple people are shopping together or just adjacent to one another or when carts are just too close to the barriers. It also assumes that reading is instant and faultless when its not and fails to support anyone who wanders in from the street without an account set up expecting normal payment options. This makes it suitable for a membership club which expects to set up payment as part of setting up membership and useless for the 99% of stores that don't work like that.
Why not wait a few years until even a can of beans has an rfid tag, put a rfid tag in 4 corners of the cart. You should be able to compute which tags are within the bounds of the cart and allow you to pay.
The hardware to read the tags is still too expensive to put in the carts and not liable to be available as part of everyone's phones that soon so the easiest thing to do is retain the existing self checkouts and just skip the part where you scan anything. Roll up to the front. Tap your prominently displayed cart number or numbers tap your card done.
Reducing checkout to 6 seconds from multiple minutes will obviate the new loathsome situation where you actually wait in line to self checkout and will be close enough to normal procedures that it should be easy to transition to.
The scan as you shop systems that I am referring to are where you are given a little barcode scanner with a display, and you go around the shop scanning your items as you pack them. At the end of the shopping trip, you still go to the self checkout machine, but you just transfer your scan list from the portable barcode scanner to the till. At no point are you using a phone camera to scan items. Usually the trolleys have a little mount point for the scanner so you don't even need to touch anything.
I agree that having to scan out via the anti theft barriers is idiotic.
Walmart is demoing a scan as you shop system that I think relies on user cameras and the app. At least that was my impression.
With American hardware at SCO the scanners are just peripherals like a keyboard and a person walking around the store with them would tie up an entire POS computer while items were being scanned with it.
If the portable scanner were itself a portable device this would be tractable however how do you keep people from stealing or destroying them?
> Walmart is demoing a scan as you shop system that I think relies on user cameras and the app. At least that was my impression.
Walmart and Sam’s Club have both had this for years. It is only available at Walmart if you have Walmart+. I tried it when I had a Sam’s Club membership and it was ok but occasionally I’d have account issues, alcohol purchasing issues, and someone still wants to see your app receipt when you walk out the door issues.
It's like a gift-registry, but you take all the stuff with you when you're done instead of letting other people buy it for you later.
We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
That's become a thing at Home Depot, and I do exactly the same. I wish all the self-checkouts would use guns. Once you get used to just putting things in the cart code-up, it makes checkout pretty painless.
Heck, I even do the 'leave the bags in the car' trick too. I'm going to be using the cart anyway, so why do the extra step at the checkout instead of just loading it directly into the bags in the car.
Glad to know I'm not the only person who thinks this is a good way to do it.
>I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
Thats an interesting optimization. Don't bag your stuff in the store just walk out with a cart of loose groceries. Especially for someone who simply MUST bring all the groceries inside with one trip, I can just load up a crate.
Back in the days when we got plastic shopping bags, I considered it an art form to see if I could get an entire trunk load of groceries into the house in a single trip. Without squishing the bread.
You can get a lot of bags on your arms, and one or two jugs of milk in each hand depending on how long your fingers are.
It just isn't as fun with the reusable folding bags. Or the paper bags some retailers use -- the ones with handles are the worst, they rip a good part of the time. Actually easier to carry a normal paper bag than one with handles.
Plastic bags were great, I could hook as many as I could lift on a padded carabiner.
With mandatory paper bags they seem to have made them as flimsy as possible. I can't go grocery shopping when its raining any more, the bags just turn into mush at the slightest drizzle.
I've pretty much given up on reusable bags. I almost always do grocery shopping at random times, and never bring my bags with me when I leave the house.
That's why if you use a car you have more bags that you need on one run in the trunk. Then you keep bringing them in the house by twos or threes and at some point you drown in reusable bags and put them back in the trunk.
Having developed a hate for all those one use bags clogging your trash also helps. I've started doing this before it was the eco thing to do just because I hated accumulating bags.
Walking to the corner store(tm) if that option is available to you requires a bit more discipline, but I mostly remember to pick a bag when leaving home.
Interesting, it works the other way around here. You get a portable barcode gun that you carry around the store or put in a sort of cup holder on the cart.
So I always bring a bag or a foldable crate, throw everything in while shopping and then put that in the car.
I'm in the US, and we have both. It varies by store. Some have scan-as-you-go, some have self-checkout with fixed scanners, some have gun scanners. My personal preference is gun scanners at self checkout.
peel off the RFID tags from the expensive vine ripened tomatoes and replace them with tags from the really cheap ones (people already do this with the plastic stickers)
In the US (mid-Atlantic states) the supermarkets have tried this for years with very little success. Giant (Ahold) in particular persists with this, perhaps because they have a unionized workforce and would like nothing more than to slash their employee count.
I would credit it much less if it corresponded less well with my observations over more than 20 years shopping weekly at grocery stores, mostly Giant and its predecessors, in Maryland.
My current local grocery store has been my local grocery store for most of those 20-plus years. I remember when it was still a Super Fresh. It was a better place to shop then, and had about twice the current staff, despite at that time being quite a bit smaller.
That Giant has hollowed out the workforce is not in question. The question has been why; I didn't know grocery workers here were unionized, but if the union here is as effective as the one I hoped to join in my own high-school summer job days bagging groceries, then this frankly makes a lot of sense as a reason.
Stop and Shop (in New England) had hand scanners you could do this with 15 years ago. I have been shocked that the technology didn't spread. It was so easy to scan and bag then just plug the scanner in at checkout and pay.
Stop and Shop now has self-checkout where you have to scan and move your items one at a time into your bag, because it's doing continuous weight-based reconciliation.
So if you have six of the same yoghurt, you have to scan them and then place them in your bag one at a time. And if you have a 24 pack of sodas, you need to haul it out of your cart onto the scales as you're checking out. And if anything goes wrong (item didn't weight what the system expected; you moved the item too fast onto the scales etc) then you get a "please wait while someone helps you", which involves an employee having to come and clear the error.
There should be a hand scanner and a "skip bagging" option that allows you to keep heavy things on your cart. I'm pretty sure I have seen it at stop and shop before too.
I refuse to use those (although I will probably need to use it, eventually), because they do this annoying "BING!" when I pass whatever item they are trying to push.
2+3=5. In general, the weight idea is impossible. For any two items, you can find the LCM in units of the precision of the scale, and then you won't know if they got LCM/a of one or LCM/b of the other.
I think there's another technical issue with using RFID. If you have a basket of a few dozen different RFID chips, there's going to be a lot of collisions in the data they transmit, further reducing reliability.
At Meijer stores I've shopped at, there are fancy scales in the produce section.
They work like this: Scan the barcode on the produce if it has one (or pick it from a picture-list, or search by name, or just key in the 4-digit PLU if you're cool like that), put it on the scale, and it spits out a barcode label that identifies the product and the weight.
At self-checkout, one just scans the generated barcode label and puts the produce in the bagging area like any other item.
Unlike the self-checkout kiosks themselves: There's never any wait to use these machines, so it's an easy process that doesn't involve making other people wait.
This process would work the same, I think, for applications where portable scanners are in-use.
They have the same at my local Wegman's but there's really no incentive to use it. I'm not any faster than the cashier so there's no time savings.
And it has several problems as well with respect to loss (e.g. adding more items to the bag). To deal with that, you'd have to weigh it or count again to verify.
The advantage comes during shopping trips when one is not planning to use a cashier to check out, wherein: You're going to have the weigh the produce yourself, anyway, so you might as well get that done in advance.
1. The PLUs are posted on the price signs in the produce section, so it's easy to remember them accurately when I weigh stuff.
Entering the 4-digit PLU for starfruit is faster than navigating a list of pictures or searching by name, and is easy when I just saw it a moment ago: Short-term memory is a blessing and a curse, and this process makes good use of it. (I probably won't remember the PLU by the time I finish shopping and reach the self-checkout, except for bananas: That PLU has made it all the way to long-term memory and is 4011.)
2. Stress. The whole time I'm weighing out my produce at one of these fancy scales (I have to weigh it eventually anyway), I am at ease and am free to work at whatever pace I wish. This is not necessarily the case at self-checkout when there is a line of people behind me who simply want me to get done and be out of their way, so they can be done and out of there themselves.
3. The self-checkout line moves faster when my produce is already weighed. This offers me do direct advantage. But unlike some people, I am not a sociopath: Given the choice to make a thing easier or harder for someone else, at about equal cost to me, I try to do the thing that makes it easier for them. So I prefer that the line move faster, even if that doesn't actually save me any of my own time.
tl;Dr, I could behave more like crabs in a bucket, but instead I choose a more-orderly path and weigh my produce in advance.
Was going to say, this process sounds a lot more complicated than just putting stuff in my bag and letting a cashier deal with it. If they want to automate the cashier away, fine, but I'm not doing their job for them.
The Wegmans I shopped at in Rochester had scales that would produce a special barcode you could scan into the app that would record both the item and the weight.
If customers are willing to use an app, that makes things a lot easier to implement. Safeway/Vons in the US only have self-checkout machines. Seems like it's shifted towards per-item produce pricing, but the stickers often fall off.
See also the RFID tags Uniqlo and Decathlon use for self-checkout. You just place your shopping bag in a bin and it reads all the items within in a second.
My guess is that right now this isn't viable for lower margin food products. Uniqlo and decathlon probably don't sell that much for less than £10. It's going to be a while before you can reasonably do that for a pint of milk.
These would be 290 yen ($1.90) 790 yen ($5.20) in Japan respectively.
I still don't think an RFID will eat that much into their profit margin, but Uniqlo is in the unique position of having stricter control over their supply chain. All the products they sell are Uniqlo-branded products, manufactured specifically for Uniqlo, and they can just have RFID tags embedded in the price tags for all the products with little extra cost.
Grocery stores sells cans, plastic jugs, glass bottles, shrink-wrapped fresh produce and even plain vegetable and fruit or grain and legumes by weight. All of these comes from a wide variety of manufacturers that don't produce directly for you (or even have any kind of direct relationship with you).
The wide variety of form factors makes attaching RFID to everything unrealistic, and even for the stuff you could attach RFID to, it's not like manufacturers would do that for you.
When I worked there back in 2005, Best Buy had an RFID test setup in the basement of their HQ that could tell what you had in your cart without scanning.
Walmart was also working on similar technology, but from what I heard they couldn’t convince suppliers to include RFID tags on all of their products.
The problem with your second suggestion is that it gives the customer no recourse for improperly tagged/scanned items. Interaction with a human or checkout system before leaving the store is necessary, given how ripe for abuse a totally automated checkout system would be.
Agreed - I think there's also the issue of people needing to be pre-registered with such a system, and not being able to accept cash. I would expect that in the future, systems like that will be an "express lane" for the particularly prepared, but not necessarily the default.
Nothing, the same as current self-checkout systems. You can already easily just put stuff in your pocket or ring expensive items up as incorrect, cheaper things. I suspect shops have done a risk analysis and decided that they'd prefer to have more shoplifting and fewer staff.
At least in Walmart I've had workers come over to me multiple times to verify I correctly scanned things. There's definitely more scrutiny involved when you have a centralized self-checkout (this only happens in the more sketchy Walmart, the nicer one seems to trust people more).
> You can already easily just put stuff in your pocket or ring expensive items up as incorrect, cheaper things
This is actually already somewhat solved. The other day I was at a Safeway and one carton of milk had an unreadable label so I scanned a different carton and put the unreadable one in the bag instead (same product). The system showed me a video of me doing that, highlighting the fact that I didn't put the item I scanned on the bag (!) and asked me to wait for an assistant. Pretty impressive.
I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear. Even before self-checkouts existed, people still shoplifted. And in some places, the honor system even works much of the time.
> I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear.
I'm sure you're right. I suspect that there are massive variations from shop location to shop location, even within a region. I also suspect there are different kinds of shoplifting. I remember hearing a friend who is not the kind of person to just pocket an item and leave, bragging about ringing up protein powder from a bulk dispenser as flour to save money. That kind of behaviour is definitely going to be hard to model.
I use this regularly at the local stop & shop -- it's been in place for easily 10 years.
You scan your loyalty card (in my case a picture of it on my phone) and it releases a wireless barcode scanner with an android touchscreen phone-like thing in it.
Walk around the store, scan things and put them directly in my bags.
My favorite part is checking out without scanning anything and getting bemused looks (and occasional challenges) from other customers -- sometimes even from store staff.
Definitely saves time in my opinion over any other option. I only need to touch things twice vs 3 or 4 times and the wireless barcode scanner is much more reliable than the cacophony of things yelling at me with the self checkout. Weights don't always match, vision sensors think i'm doing the wrong thing.
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I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.