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Have any of you built a check-in/check-out station in your kitchen for scanning your grocery items and adding and removing them from/to your #Grocy inventory? Presumably involving a laser barcode scanner and not a phone/tablet camera (which is rather slow)?

If so, sound off below.

Boosts appreciated too, of course!

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in reply to Florian Haas

@Florian Haas I have a laser barcode scanner, but too few individual items have barcodes to make it worthwhile for me
in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard Wait... what? Over here (EU), pretty much any grocery item you buy anywhere (except maybe produce you buy at the farmers market) has its barcode on the packaging, usually in multiple spots... is that not the case in Canada?
in reply to Florian Haas

@Florian Haas Most wrappers will have a barcode, but my issue is that I have a lot of items that are basically partials. Individual apples or carrots, concentrated juice cans and stuff often don't have usuable UPCs (might be that I buy from mostly smaller grocers)
in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard

Similarly, as the primary grocery-shopper, while I have a pretty good mental inventory of what comes *in* to the house, the struggle here involves getting the *rest* of the house to participate and keep me apprised of things getting consumed. The boy pulled the last shampoo from backup; the daughter snagged the penultimate roll of TP; my sweetheart made herself a sandwich and now I lack sufficient bread for kids' school lunches in the morning.

Fortunately, my beloved does a lot of Lean at work, so we usually communicate my intended "kanban" levels of backstock and she'll usually let me know if we get low enough that it's time to restock. But tracking the *out* rate is as important as (and more difficult here than) tracking the *in*.

@xahteiwi

in reply to Tim Chase

Exactly. Hence the question. Checking stuff out of the inventory must be as easy as swiping it across a scanner as someone takes it out of the fridge or pantry. Swipe ONCE, that is, and hear a beep. And that must be the entirety of the interaction. If it's not as simple as what the cashier at the store does in approximately 100 milliseconds, it's too complicated.

@silverwizard

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Florian Haas

But then you need scanning-stations at all consumption locations. In each bathroom for the TP/soap/shampoo; in each bedroom when the respective box of tissues runs out; in the study because someone used the last of the printer-ink or white-out.

I wish you luck, but if your experiences will be anything like mine, you're in for a long uphill slog 😛

@silverwizard

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