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Mark my words, retailers who don't figure out smart, helpful, shopper-centric ways to harness the growing penetration of smart phones are going to evoke an old general store's big brass mechanical cash register: quaint, obsolete, and a reminder of how people used to shop in the past.

Meijer, a 194 store regional hypermarket chain based in Grand Rapids, Michigan has launched a trial system in four of their flagship stores that let users locate more than 100,000 items in store along with facilities like bathrooms and customer service. 

Indoor positioning systems have long been a holy grail for malls and big-box retailers – where labyrinthine aisles and massive floorplans often leave customers lost and irritated. The obstacles to deploying such a system are many: you've got to create detailed maps for every facility where you want it to work, and you need some sort of system for locating users with a reasonable level of precision since GPS is out of the picture. 

Conveniently, these stores have some 26 WiFi nodes deployed, which helps triangulate users down to a reasonable level of precision – though it's probably not going to be able to tell if you're standing in front of Heinz Ketchup or Hunt's.

But who cares. It's a fun, exciting, novel, useful shopper marketing tool, and, best of all, a free download for iPhone and Android users.