Here in Chicago the Jewel/Osco chain of grocery stores tried handheld scanners mated with the self-checkout systems about 10 years ago. I lived near one of the

Here in Chicago the Jewel/Osco chain of grocery stores tried handheld scanners mated with the self-checkout systems about 10 years ago. I lived near one of the test stores. It worked pretty well, but from what I heard the shoplifting rate was a lot higher than the comfort level of the store's executives. There really is no way to check that you've scanned every single thing in a large cart full of goods. They experimented with things like random checks from cashiers, but that just added to the labor and confusion. The project was scrapped a year or two later. RFID could fix that if we're really close to being able to scan a whole cart full of goods in one sweep (which the Amazon project seems to imply). But then you have an issue where every single vendor to your store needs to be inserting compatible tags into the packaging. That adds cost and logistics.