Have you heard of QThru? If not, welcome to the club - before tonight, I didn't even know it existed. Basically, it's a cool take on self-checkouts at brick-and-mortar stores. The idea is simple: carry your phone around, scanning barcodes of the stuff you intend on buying. Once you're finished, head over to the QThru kiosk and use it to scan the QR on your phone, essentially closing the transaction. All of your credit card info is stored within the QThru app on your device, so once you've scanned the QR, you're done. A worker at participating retailers would likely be hanging around to compare the cart's contents to the receipt, just to make sure you're not up to no good. Not like you - our esteemed reader - would do such a thing, anyway.

QThru is just starting to make its way into the U.S. now, and should be available in roughly 14 grocery and hardware stores in the Seattle, WA area by the end of January according to this report from The Next Web. From there, the service will likely continue to branch out, focusing mostly on smaller stores.

The good news here, though, is that if you're in an area where QThru will be available, you won't have to wait for an Android app. With the QThru app, you can keep a list of your favorite items, view in-store specials, get product details (including nutritional information), keep a watch on the total, and more.

For more info on QThru and its service, head here; to grab the app, hit the widget below.