Shopping revolution to be pioneered in Siberia

'Perekryostok - Store of the Future' is currently being road tested in Moscow with no sales staff or cashiers but up to 5,300 articles for sale. 

After Moscow, the Store of the Future is set to debut in Siberia in the Tomsk region and also in Tatarstan. The concept is based on RFID tags allowing basketfuls of shopping to be priced in a split second at the checkout barrier. 

Apparently it will be the end of queues while sales assistants try to read the bar code. 

The project, more advanced than Western rivals, has been developed by X5 Retail Group, Russia's largest food products retail network; Rusnano, the country's Nanotech giant; and RTI, a sizable Russian developer of projects in radio electronics, aerospace technology, navigation, and microelectronics.

'To shop in such a store, a customer takes the goods he or she has chosen through an automatic 'cashier', or a scanner. By putting stuff into a special scanning section, the buyer can see on a terminal display all the necessary data on the articles, and a total to be paid,' reported marchmontnews.com.

'All goods in a basket are scanned simultaneously, which speeds up the process significantly. Another terminal is put for the customer to pay, using cash, credit cards, and contactless techniques, including payment enabled by the NFC technology in a mobile phone'.