NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - A computerized shopping cart that greets you by name, gives you your shopping history and helps you look for products quickly so that you don't have to search all the aisles.

Amazingly, that's not something out of the distant future. It's just one of the features of Metro AG's prototype "Future Store," on display in Rheinberg, Germany, since last April -- and perhaps headed for a superstore near you.

"We are standing at the very beginning of the technological modernizations of retailing," Metro Group's CEO Hans-Joachim Korber told a gathering this week at the National Retail Federation's annual convention in New York.

The computerized shopping cart has a PC tablet attached to it.

Future Store is a functioning store that looks like a high-tech Wal-Mart supercenter -- except that it's really a working laboratory where the company has been testing a slew of tech innovations that could wind up where you shop.

Among those innovations: A "smart shelf" fitted with an electronic price tag that displays the correct price and also alerts floor associates if the product needs to be restocked or if the Pantene shampoo was put back in the toothpaste shelf.

There's also the intelligent weighing scale, fitted with a digital camera, which automatically recognizes whether you're weighing an apple or a banana.

Intel, Microsoft, IBM and SAP are some of the tech powerhouses that have partnered with Metro Group to develop the technologies.

"Our research has shown that the customer of the future wants better customer service, shorter queuing time at the checkout, more personalized advertising and an easier shopping experience," Korber said. "These new technologies will decisively contribute to changing the image of today's retailing business."

And pretty soon merchants will also have the option of letting customers pay with their fingertips instead of their wallets. San Francisco-based company Pay By Touch this week said IBM had agreed to work with the company to offer its Finger scan point-of-sale systems to retailers.

The Pay By Touch system uses biometics, where it doesn't actually store the fingerprint but just a few geometric points that it then converts into a mathematical formula that can't be duplicated or decoded, company CEO Craig Ramsey told CNN/Money.

Ramsey said the one-time enrollment process is less than a minute – shoppers scan their finger, enter an access code and swipe in the cards and accounts they want to use in their e-wallet in the future. The next time shoppers visit a store with the Pay By Touch system, they simply scan their finger, their e-wallet opens up and they choose how they want to pay for their purchases.

Craig said the benefit to consumers is that they don't need to carry bulky wallets with them everytime they shop. For retailers, it could cut down the checkout time and reduce costs associated with check fraud.

Korber and other industry leaders, including Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, hammered home to the retailers the growing importance of radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology to reduce costs across the supply chain and efficiently manage inventory.

And they're serious. In fact, Wal-Mart had outlined requirements in November stating that its top 100 suppliers would have to become RFID compliant and deliver RFID tagged products by January 2005.

The Future Store's intelligent scale.

But in his address to the NRF Sunday, Scott seemed to soften his stance on the issue, saying that the world's largest retailer would work with its suppliers to enable them to meet the deadline.

Observers say the RFID tag technology, which consists of a microchip coded with a serial number, makes it easier for retailers to track and identify products along the supply chain and in stores.

"Costs go down because of more efficient processes, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty will improve because product availability will be more reliable,' said Korber. "This, in turn, will contribute to an increase in sales."

Marshal Cohen, industry analyst with the market research firm NPD Group, agrees that technological innovations will lead to changes in the industry -- although he's cautious about the pace of change.

"RFID implementation and the Future Store-type models will find their way into the U.S. retail industry over the next few years," said Cohen. "Change is inevitable and necessary. RFID is needed to take inventory management to the next level. On the political level, some say the RFID tag invades consumer privacy."

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Consumer advocate groups have criticized RFID tags, alleging that if the tag remains active once you leave the store with item, it's easy to track the consumer. Another charge is that the chips enable retailers to store too much information about a consumer, such as their product preference and shopping pattern.

Added Cohen, "Retailers will have to figure out if they need all this information about their consumers and what they'll do with the information. With the Future Store model, I think retailers and consumers will want to be convinced that they should start thinking this way. It's a costly investment."