Shopping for groceries in my house is a colossal pain in the ass. Every time, I have to go to the fridge, look at all the foodstuffs that I don't have, write them down on a piece of paper, go to Costco, and buy them all again. My wishes for a Web 2.0 style revolution of this process have finally been answered.

Ikan is a barcode scanner that you use to scan the empty packages of shit when you throw it out so you know to buy more. It's got some web integration thing so it will e-mail you a shopping list. It will even send your list to an online grocer!

Yes, this is fucking for real.

Big Iron

So okay. Let's get think about this. You pay God knows how much (price hasn't been announced) for this device that occupies valuable kitchen-counter real estate. When you throw something away, you scan its bar code. (Ikan has an awesome feature that will tell you whether or not the packaging is recyclable. That is some confusing shit right there, good thing we now have computers to help us.)

At the end of the week when you've finished the last box of Hamburger Helper, you go to Ikan's web site and get your shopping list, take it to the store, and buy all the same shit again. If you read between the lines, you'll note that this device needs internet access.

The hardware specs for this monstrosity are getting pretty beefy:

• Wireless NIC, probably 802.11b/g compatible
• Barcode scanner
• Some kind of solid-state storage, probably a flash card
• Color LCD display

You've got hardware enough here to crack 3DES, and you're using it to make a fucking grocery list, a task that requires a pencil, pad of paper, and pair of eyeballs.

You Forgot Poland

If you're like me, you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, own an iPod, drive a Prius, and only eat organic vegan food. And you buy it from a farmers' market so you don't have to support the corporate machine (unless of course we're talking about Whole Foods).

What if your food doesn't have a barcode? Well fortunately for hippies like you, Ikan has a voice recorder. Yeah, you press a button or some shit and say "lettuce" to it. The kicker is, this voice message gets sent to Ikan's Customer Service department, where someone will listen to it and add it to your list!

I'm going to be the first one to order a 20-pack of Extra Pleasure Ribbed Condoms, a half gallon of KY Jelly, and a home enema kit.

BTW, Fuck TechCrunch

CrunchGear busted a nut all over itself for this one. Here is the opening sentence to their review:

I believe that everyone can admit without a doubt that our lives have become so busy that simple tasks like grocery shopping have become tedious and a huge waste of time.

One would think that nourishment, one of the fundamental necessities for life, will never be a "huge waste of time". If your life is so busy that you don't have time to procure food for yourself, then you are the sole piece of necessary evidence in the case for Darwinian evolution.

It goes on,

[grocery shopping is] a two hour process for me and that’s a lot of time wasted when I could be doing other important things.

Other important things like...uh...writing about waste-of-money fucking barcode scanners? Masturbating over pastel colors and rounded box corners? Why do people continue to read this shit?

Let's Review

Ikan claims that their product will revolutionize your grocery shopping. I have done this once before, but let's talk one more time about the definition of "revolutionary":

• Modern pesticides: revolutionary
• Automated crop irrigation systems: revolutionary
• Worldwide shipping networks that make all vegetables "in-season" regardless of where you are on the planet: revolutionary
• Making a grocery list by scanning barcodes and shit: NOT REVOLUTIONARY.