When you’re pushing a shopping cart with one hand, and grabbing groceries off the shelf with the other hand, what hand are you going to use to browse for coupons and deals on your phone?
The newest generation of shopping carts aims to solve that problem for you, offering new digital discounts that don’t require you to take out your phone at all.
Instacart has introduced new savings features on its Caper Cart smart shopping carts, to help you stay within budget and earn discounts and rewards while you shop. The cart’s interactive digital screen allows you to search for items, look for deals and check out without having to visit a cashier. Last year, Instacart added location-based digital coupons and promotions you can clip right on the screen.
And now, the smart carts feature new cash-back offers in the form of “Cart Cash.”
Caper Carts are already integrated with partner stores’ loyalty programs, allowing you to clip digital coupons on the screen. The new Cart Cash offers represent an additional category of discounts, in the form of cash back on your purchases. Offers will show up as you browse the aisles – digital coupons will give you a discount on the spot, while cash-back offers will be added to your Cart Cash balance. Once you accumulate enough Cart Cash to reach a certain threshold, you can redeem it for a discount when you check out.
In addition to item-level Cart Cash offers, other earnings opportunities include “completing shopping milestones, like making an in-store purchase three times in a month.”
Other newly-announced Caper Cart capabilities include the ability to join the retailer’s loyalty program right from the screen, by scanning a QR code or entering your phone number. Caper Carts have also now become the first smart carts to offer on-screen EBT SNAP tracking, allowing shoppers to see which items are eligible, and providing running totals of eligible and ineligible products in real time, so there are no surprises when checking out.
Future capabilities include pre-shop email and text reminders for shoppers who opt in, highlighting promotions and discounts they’re likely to be interested in.
All of these new features build upon the Caper Cart capabilities Instacart introduced around this time last year. The addition of location-based digital coupons allowed shoppers to learn about nearby coupon deals and discounts as they head down each aisle. “For example,” Instacart explained, “when a customer rolls into the bakery department, Caper Cart’s digital screen will surface a coupon for a dollar off a box of muffins.” There are also “aisle-aware ads,” which show up as you head down the relevant aisle. And “gamified quests” allow Caper Cart users to take advantage of flash deals and earn other rewards by playing “interactive mini-games” as they shop.
The newly-announced savings features are available at “select retailers” so far, including the Midwestern grocer McKeever’s and some grocery stores that are part of the Wakefern grocery cooperative. Larger grocery chains like Kroger and Schnucks may be next, as they already offer Caper Carts in many of their stores.
“Caper Carts are transforming everyday grocery trips into a more affordable, rewarding, and personalized experience for customers,” Instacart’s Chief Connected Stores Officer David McIntosh said in a statement. With Caper Carts now available in stores spanning nearly 100 cities across 15 states, their growing popularity illustrates “the growing demand to bring digital convenience into the grocery aisles.”
In-store smart carts, powered by an online grocery delivery service, represent the latest example of how the line between in-store and online shopping continues to blur. Now, these physical carts allow you to take advantage of even more digital discounts – without ever having to take out your phone.
Image source: Instacart
This still doesn’t solve the problem for seniors who live on SS only and only have a flip phone. The smart phones are too expensive and I wouldn’t know how to use it. It took my sister 2 years to learn how to do everything on her smartphone. Her daughter had to show her a little bit at a time. Put paper coupons back in the newspaper if only a couple of times a month. I had a bad stroke on 2024 so my husband has to get a lot of what he can fix.