Patent ID: 7044369

Claim:
A customer station for use in an items purchasing system in a supermarket or other retail store, the customer station comprising: (a) an identification assembly capable of reading items' identification codes, identifying a nature of selected item of customer's interest, and generating data indicative of information related to the item of interest to be presented to the customer, said information including a current price of the selected item; (b) a data presentation unit for presenting to the customer information related to the selected items; (c) a tag deactivating and reactivating unit configured and operable to deactivate a security tag attached to the item to thereby prevent its identification by an external security assembly thus enabling identification of the respective item as a purchased one, and to reactivate the previously deactivated tag to thereby enable its identification as a non-purchased item; and (d) a control unit connectable to said identification assembly and to said tag deactivating and reactivating unit, and comprising a processor utility and an indication utility, said control unit being configured and operable to be responsive to the generated data indicative of the information related to the item to operate the tag deactivation upon identifying a valid scan event from the identification assembly, thereby enabling the identification of the respective item as the purchased one and include the item data into a list of purchased items, and to be responsive to a signal indicative of the completion of the reactivation process to remove the non-purchased item data from the list and activate the indication utility to generate an acknowledge signal.