Self-Inventory is certainly not a new concept in retail.  In the past, virtually ALL retailers took their own inventories.  These manual inventories were taken with pen and paper, by the associates that worked in the stores, and the raw count data was then processed by data processing services.

In the 70s & 80s, with the advent of the bar code and the SKU, retailers were forced to turn to outside counting services.  Why?  They wanted to take advantage of the improved speed and accuracy of bar code scanning… and the cost of scanning equipment and technology was too high to bring in-house.

Most retailers knew that their own associates could perform a better, more accurate count… but the high costs of equipment and software were too much to overcome.

Today - with the Hart rental model – the cost of self-scanned inventories has become very affordable (often much less expensive than the outside services themselves) and retailers can once again take control of the physical inventory process.