And finally…unmanned village shop to be run through smart phone app

Robert Ilijason plans to open unmanned village stores where customers can use a phone app to unlock the door and scan purchases –and even make requests for stock.

Mr Ilijason said that he came up with the idea one night after becoming exasperated having dropped his family’s last jar of baby food and being forced to drive 15 miles from his home in Viken, about an hour north of Malmo, to find another.

“I thought that there should be a store here and started thinking about how to solve this problem in a modern, technical, way,” he told the Swedish newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad.

“The last grocery store we had in the village closed years ago.”

His first store will open in the old post office building in Viken, where registered customers can let themselves in using their phone and shop unsupervised 24 hours a day, scanning bar codes of products with their phones.

Purchases will be calculated and customers will receive their bills at the end of the month.

Apple is due to approve his app for sale and Mr Ilijason says he is now forming plans to open a chain of unmanned shops.

He says he hopes to include a feedback feature on the app which would allow customers to request specific products they want to see for sale. “If people want pepper chips instead of salt and vinegar potato chips they can ask for them,” he said.