Monday, September 9, 2002		Feature

Shop sans shopkeeper
Deborah Zabarenko

Local residents walk next to an automated convenience store along a main street in the Adams-Morgan district of Washington. The 24-hour kiosk is the first to arrive in Washington and carries dozens of different household items, foods and DVDs, and takes either cash or credit cards.

IT'S late, the shops are closed and you simply must have a roasted eggplant-and-ricotta sandwich and an iced cappuccino. There's really only one place to go: the deli-sized vending machine on the corner.

Feed in your money or your credit card, touch a few squares on a computer screen, and voila — the robotic metal shopping basket finds your items and delivers them to your waiting hands.

The monster vending machine, smaller than a typical suburban convenience store but about the same size as an inner-city deli, made its Washington debut in the city's raffish Adams Morgan neighbourhood.

The Tiktok Easy Shop Big Box, as it is known, is still in the testing phase, and drew more window-shoppers than customers on Thursday, two weeks after it opened at the edge of a restaurant parking lot.

"When we listed the space (for rent), we knew something cool was coming, but we didn't know what," Luis Reyes, who works at the parking lot says. He used a credit card to buy one of the Big Box's more expensive items, a men's travel kit for $8.75.

"I like it very much, very convenient," Reyes said. "It's got a brain."

It certainly seems so. The Box knows not to pile a heavy glass bottle on top of a carton of eggs, which it sells for $1.50 per half-dozen, and will refuse to sell outdated milk or a stale sandwich if their expiration dates are programmed into the machine.

It can be a bit impatient, though. Hesitate for more than a few seconds before entering an item's number on the touchpad and it cancels the order. And customer service is necessarily more impersonal than it would be with, well, a person.

There is at least one human in attendance, however. Arun Dev manages the Box, keeping it stocked and clean.

The Washington Big Box was stocked with the essentials of life appropriate to a slightly funky but upscale clientele. Health-food juices, fresh pasta and designer coffee drinks shared shelf space with milk, snack chips and condoms. An attached booth offers DVD movies for rent.

Matt Allen, who bought a jug of water, was enthusiastic.

"It was really cool," Allen said. "It was good to just pull in, get something and go."

Such machines have been used previously in Japan and Europe, but they are new to the USA.

The actual vending machine is made by Automated Distribution Technologies Inc., of Exton, Pennsylvania. The company calls the device Shop 2000, and bills it as the first fully automated convenience store. Michael King, an engineer and one of the designers of Shop 2000, said an earlier, less sophisticated version of the machine was tested near Howard University in Washington and before that, there was an earlier test in York, Pennsylvania.