US 5250789

I'll verify the patent details against available sources and check for any 2026 litigation activity.

US Patent 5,250,789 — Summary

Bibliographic Data

Abstract (verbatim)

"A shopping display system for organizing a shopping list in accordance with the locations of products in a store and for displaying promotions in response to a product being scanned by a product scanner. The shopping list may be generated with the assistance of a cash register tape bearing the product bar codes associated with the purchased products. The product scanner is mounted on a shopping cart so that promotions are issued in response to the products while the shopper is in the middle of the shopping visit. This system includes a display mounted on the shopping cart and a product code scanner. The system may also be provided with a disk drive, keypad and wireless communications."

Independent Claims — Plain-Language Overview

The patent has 22 claims, of which six are independent: claims 1, 14, 16, 17, 18, and 19. Two distinct families of subject matter are covered — (A) an aisle-sorted shopping-list display, and (B) scan-triggered in-aisle merchandising on a cart.

Claim 1 — Aisle-ordered shopping list display system.
A system for use in a store that (a) receives shopping-list data (inputs may be keypad, disk drive, scanner, or serial/data port), (b) looks items up in a database to find each item's location in the store, (c) re-sorts the list into store-location (e.g., aisle) order, and (d) displays the list in that order. The point is to give the shopper a walk-order route rather than a random list.

Claim 14 — Cart-mounted merchandising system with optional discount interaction.
A shopping cart carrying a programmable display, a controller for it, and a product-code scanner. When a product code is scanned, the system displays a merchandise promotion containing a discount offer, and there is a user-activated input (button/key/touch) allowing the shopper to accept that offer. This is the core "scan a product → get an offer → accept it in the aisle" claim.

Claim 16 — Cart merchandising system, complementary-product variant.
Same cart/display/controller/scanner structure, but the discount offer displayed is specifically for a product complementary to the product just scanned (specification's example: scan tuna fish → offer on mayonnaise).

Claim 17 — Cart merchandising system, repeat-purchase variant.
Same structure, but the discount offer is for additional purchases of the same product just scanned (specification's example: scan one can of coffee → coupon for a second can).

Claim 18 — Cart merchandising system with remotely updatable promotions.
Same structure, plus wireless communication means for receiving a revised merchandise promotion so that the promotion delivered in response to a scanned code can be changed remotely (e.g., from the store's central computer).

Claim 19 — Method of generating a shopping list from a bar-coded receipt.
A four-step method: (1) purchase goods on a first shopping trip; (2) print a receipt listing the goods and bar codes for those goods; (3) scan the bar codes of selected goods from that receipt in preparation for a second trip; (4) store a list of the products identified by the scanned bar codes. Notably, the receipt itself carries scannable UPC codes — a distinctive aspect of the disclosure.

Dependent claims of note: claims 2–13 depend on claim 1 (adding scanner-triggered promotions, coupons, coupon matching against a shopper's held coupons, user response input, printer, disk-drive input, cart mounting, and wirelessly updated price database); claim 15 adds a coupon printer to claim 14; claims 20–22 depend on claim 19 (adding catalog bar-code scanning, coupon bar-code scanning, and storage of the list on a floppy disk).

Notable Prior Art Cited on the Face

Gogulski 4,071,740 (cart-mounted POS); Clyne 4,373,133; Sutton 4,458,320 (cart-mounted calculator); Mindrum 4,723,212 (point-of-sale coupon issuance); Baus 4,750,151; Yourick 4,775,935; Humble 4,792,018 (unattended self-service retailing); Off 4,910,672 (paperless POS discounts, CIP of Mindrum); Collins 4,929,819 (cart module for pre-scan self-checkout); Malec 4,973,952 (cart video advertising triggered by passing a shelf product); Bianco 5,047,614; Hunt 5,111,196; Tannehill 5,158,310. Also non-patent literature including Chain Store Age Executive (1988), The New York Times, and Technology Review (1991).

Litigation / Docket Check — Important Caveats

I ran searches targeting USPTO records and Federal Circuit docket activity tied to the number 5250789 and found no authoritative indication of any 2026 CAFC docket activity involving US 5,250,789. I want to be explicit about the limits of this and about two easy confusions:

1. Number collisions. A search for "5250789" prominently returns JP 5250789 B2 (Tempal Kogyo K.K.), a Japanese two-pole circuit breaker — a completely unrelated patent that shares the digits but not the jurisdiction or technology. There is also a Chinese-language reference using "US Patent Number: 5250789" as a citation label in a supermarket self-checkout application, but that is third-party citation, not litigation.
2. The famous "shopping cart" patent litigation is NOT this patent. The Soverain Software v. Newegg / Avon / Victoria's Secret line of cases (Fed. Cir. 2013 and 2015, cert. denied 2014) concerned Soverain's e-commerce "shopping cart" patents (e.g., the Transact/Open Market family) — not Johnsen's 5,250,789. If your research objective is "the shopping cart patent litigation," it is a different patent family.
3. Status. The Google Patents record shows US 5,250,789 as "Expired – Fee Related" with an anticipated expiration of 2011-10-31. That "anticipated expiration" notation reflects an assumption, and the Google Patents legal-status data is expressly stated not to be a legal conclusion. Since the patent lapsed decades ago, it would be an unusual (though not impossible) candidate for 2026 appellate activity.

I could not verify CAFC 2026 docket coverage directly — the available tools returned general web results rather than a live PACER/CAFC docket query, so my statement that no 2026 appellate activity exists is based on absence of evidence, not a negative search of the docket system itself. If you need a definitive answer, confirm against PACER (CM/ECF) and the CAFC's daily docket for any case naming Edward L. Johnsen or US 5,250,789.

Primary source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5250789/en (fetched 2026-09-24); corroborated by FreePatentsOnline (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/5250789.html) and EveryPatent (http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5250789.html) for inventor address, examiners, and cited references.

I'll search litigation-focused sources for this specific patent number.

No hits yet on the specific patent. Let me run more targeted queries on litigation databases and the patent's owner.

Litigation Search — US 5,250,789 ("Shopping cart," Johnsen)

Bottom line

No litigation involving U.S. Patent 5,250,789 was found — neither pending nor concluded. I found no district court complaint, ITC action, PTAB/CBM proceeding, or Federal Circuit appeal in which US 5,250,789 is the asserted, challenged, or adjudicated patent.

Because the task asks for a case-by-case table, the honest result is a table of zero rows:

What I searched

• General queries pairing the number with litigation terms: US patent 5250789 litigation; "5,250,789" patent lawsuit; "5,250,789" Johnsen shopping cart patent asserted defendant.
• Litigation-database-oriented queries: unifiedpatents.com litigation "5250789"; docketalarm patent 5250789 cases; "Edward L. Johnsen" patent "shopping cart" infringement lawsuit.
• Owner-name queries (Johnsen as inventor/pro se individual assignee).

Search-tool caveat (same as the prior section): the tools returned general web results rather than live, structured PACER/CM-ECF or Unified Patents caselist docket records. A portal URL like portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist cannot be queried by patent number through this interface. My conclusion is therefore based on absence of evidence, not on a verified negative docket search. See "How to confirm definitively" below.

Hits that look like this patent but are not

These are the collision/confusion artifacts I actually observed, and none is litigation of this patent:

1. JP 5250789 B2 — Japanese Patent No. 5250789, granted 2013-07-31 to テンパール工業株式会社 (Tempal Kogyo K.K.) for a two-pole circuit breaker (２極回路遮断器), filed as JP 2011-232296. Unrelated jurisdiction and technology. (Verified: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/af/50/d0/9d9bb82a0af1e5/JP5250789B2.pdf)
2. CourtListener "investment 5250789" — this is an internal sequential API record ID for a judicial financial-disclosure investment line ("Brk Act #4 NY NY 5/28"), not a patent docket. (https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/investments/5250789/)
3. Prior-art search string — in an exhibit filed in IPR2014-01239 (Inter Partes Review of U.S. Pat. 8,630,795), the text ("5047614" "5054569" "5250789" ...) appears as a keyword string run against patent databases. (https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2014-01239/...Exhibit-1002...) This is third-party use of the number as prior art in someone else's IPR — not an IPR against 5,250,789.
4. A reexamination "Litigation Search Report" (Reexam 90/007,402) surfaced in results, but it concerns U.S. Pat. 5,191,573 (SightSound.com v. N2K), a different patent entirely.

Related-but-distinct activity worth flagging (not this patent's litigation)

• Massive prior-art footprint, minimal assertion history. The Google Patents "Cited By" tab lists 435 third-party citations to US 5,250,789. Its claims (aisle-sorted list display; scan-triggered in-aisle discount offers; remotely updatable promotions) were subsequently treated as background art by later cart-advertising and self-checkout applicants. Heavy citation as prior art is very different from being litigated.
• Assignee trail. A search hit on a different Klever Marketing patent (US 8,208,014, "Electronic shopping cart display system," which cites Johnsen as prior art) shows an assignment to Klever Marketing, Inc. on 2001-05-31 from inventors Geiger, Begum, McElroy and others. That assignment is on Klever's own patent family, not an assignment of US 5,250,789, whose Google Patents record lists the assignee as Individual. I do not have high-confidence data on Klever's own early-2000s cart-display enforcement campaign and am therefore not asserting any connection between it and 5,250,789.

Why a 2026 case is essentially implausible

Per the authoritative patent record you supplied: status is "Expired – Fee Related," anticipated expiration 2011-10-31. Damages under 35 U.S.C. § 286 reach back only six years from filing, and the patent could not have been infringed after lapse. A complaint filed on or after ~2017 would be time-barred and directed at an unenforceable-in-fact patent. This independently corroborates the null litigation result.

How to confirm definitively

Because my "none found" is an absence-of-evidence finding, verify against these before relying on it:

1. PACER / CM-ECF — party search "Johnsen, Edward L." and a full-text docket search for 5,250,789 and 5250789.
2. Unified Patents litigation portal and Docket Alarm patent-page query (case-list filtered by patent number).
3. USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records for app. 07/786,051 — confirm whether any assignment out of Johnsen was ever recorded (the prior section reports "Individual," but the Klever thread above makes this worth a direct records check).
4. Westlaw KeyCite / Lexis CourtLink — the same tools the USPTO used in the reexam report above; these retrieve patent-tied litigation histories directly.

Two accuracy notes

• Date inconsistency to flag: this task states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the operating context gives today as 2026-10-01, and one search result is dated 2026-10-01. This does not change the substance — no 2026 activity was found either way — but the two dates cannot both be correct as "today."
• No auto-correction applied: every 5250789 / 5,250,789 occurrence above was read literally; the JP, CourtListener, and search-string hits are reported as the unrelated entities they genuinely are.

I'll verify the absence of PTAB activity with targeted searches before drafting.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 5,250,789: zero (0). Breakdown: 0 active · 0 claims invalidated · 0 claims sustained · 0 settled · 0 institution denied.

The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — the canonical list from the USPTO Open Data Portal — returned no AIA trial proceedings. My independent searches (targeted at IPR/CBM/PGR docketing for "5,250,789," the Johnsen patent, and the cart-display art generally) surfaced no petition, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision, and no Federal Circuit appeal tied to this patent. I therefore cannot report claim-level outcomes, judge panels, or settlement terms, because none exist — inventing proceeding numbers or FWD dispositions here would be fabrication, and I will not do it.

Bottom-line defensive posture: This is the mirror image of the usual "hardened patent" situation. There is no PTAB record either way — no claim has been canceled, and no claim has been tested and sustained. But the patent's own prosecution history and legal status supply a defense that is better than a successful IPR: the record shows US 5,250,789 as "Expired – Fee Related" with the Google Patents "anticipated expiration" noted as 2011-10-31. The "Expired – Fee Related" status means the patent lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees — it did not run its full statutory term. A patent that has lapsed cannot be infringed going forward, and any assertion today is subject to the § 286 six-year damages bar. If a demand letter cites this patent, the threshold question is not "how do I invalidate it at the PTAB," it is "was any accused conduct inside an unexpired, un-lapsed damages window at all?" See the caveat in the Strategic summary about confirming the exact lapse date.

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Per-proceeding detail

None to report. There are no proceedings to order by impact. To be explicit about the categories I was asked to fill in, and why each is empty:

• Type — no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition has been identified.
• Filed — n/a.
• Status — n/a (the structured source returned an empty set; no verbatim status string exists to quote).
• Judge panel — n/a.
• Petition grounds — n/a (no § 102 / § 103 / § 112 grounds have ever been pleaded against these claims at the Board).
• Institution decision — n/a.
• Final Written Decision — n/a. No claim of US 5,250,789 has ever been canceled by the PTAB, and none has ever been held patentable by the PTAB.
• Settlement / termination — n/a.
• Appeal — n/a. No CAFC docket number exists to cite for this patent.
• Defensive value — see below.

Why "not a covered business method patent" and "not PGR-eligible" matter here

These are not merely academic; they explain why the absence of proceedings is structural rather than accidental:

1. PGR is categorically unavailable. Post-grant review under 35 U.S.C. § 321 applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. US 5,250,789 has an effective filing/priority date of 1991-10-31. No PGR could ever have been filed against it. Source: Google Patents — US5250789A.
2. CBM is unavailable now, and would have been an odd fit then. The transitional CBM program (AIA § 18) closed to new petitions for filings on or after 2020-09-16. A cart-mounted shopping display is arguably a "financial product or service" device under the CBM definition — the claims recite coupons, discounts, and rebates — but the board would also have had to find it was not a "technological invention." Regardless, the window is shut.
3. IPR was and remains the only theoretically available vehicle (not date-limited), but an IPR requires a live controversy worth paying for. An unasserted patent that has lapsed for fee non-payment attracts no petitioners.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: every claim is UNTESTED at the PTAB; nothing is CANCELED and nothing is PTAB-SUSTAINED. All 22 claims remain as issued on the face of the patent. For precision, the claims at issue cluster as follows: claims 1–13 (aisle-sorted shopping-list display, with dependent claims adding scanner-triggered promotions, coupon matching, printer, disk-drive input, cart mounting, and wirelessly updated price data); claims 14–18 (cart-mounted merchandising system, with claim 14's user-activated acceptance of a discount offer, claim 15's coupon printer, claim 16's complementary-product offer, claim 17's repeat-purchase offer, and claim 18's wireless promotion updates); claims 19–22 (method of generating a shopping list by scanning bar codes from a printed receipt, with dependents adding catalog scanning, coupon scanning, and floppy-disk storage). Because there has been no PTAB adjudication, no claim has been narrowed, canceled, or blessed.

Estoppel landscape: no estoppel exists against anyone. 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner (and its real parties in interest and privies) that has obtained a Final Written Decision. With zero FWDs, there is no petitioner-side estoppel, and equally no patent-owner-side narrowing. A defendant served today can raise any ground that has ever existed — § 102, § 103, § 112, and § 101 — without worrying about having forfeited it. Practically, that is a rare and valuable posture: the full prior-art record is unencumbered. The estate around this patent is substantial: the front page cites Gogulski 4,071,740 (cart-mounted POS), Sutton 4,458,320 (cart-mounted calculator), Collins 4,929,819 (cart scan module for pre-scan self-checkout), Malec 4,973,952 (cart video advertising triggered by shelf products), Mindrum 4,723,212 and Off 4,910,672 (point-of-sale coupon/paperless-discount issuance), and Humble 4,792,018. Malec and Collins in particular are close to claim 14's "scan on cart → display promotion" concept.

Pattern signals: there is no pattern, and that is the signal. No petitioner has filed even once, let alone repeatedly; no patent owner activity at the PTAB exists to suggest an aggressive enforcement campaign; no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, or any member-funded entity) appears anywhere in the chain. The patent's 435 "Cited By" entries — including Telxon, Symbol Technologies, IBM, Klever Marketing, and Media Cart Holdings cart-display families — show it functioning as prior art that others had to design around and cite, not as an asserted asset. A 1993 shopping-cart patent that was never taken to the Board across the entire 2012–2020 IPR/CBM boom, and that lapsed for fee non-payment, has the profile of a dormant asset.

Caveat I must flag rather than paper over

The legal-status field reads "Expired – Fee Related," and the Google Patents timeline shows an "anticipated expiration" of 2011-10-31. Those are two different things, and the fetched record does not resolve which maintenance-fee window was missed (the 3.5-year, 7.5-year, or 11.5-year fee). The "Expired – Fee Related" designation indicates the patent terminated before the 2011-10-31 twenty-year date, because maintenance fees were not paid. I could not independently confirm the exact lapse date, and I will not state one as fact. The prior sections of this analysis characterize the status the same way; there is no contradiction between them, but the exact lapse date should be pulled from USPTO Patent Center before you rely on it in a filing or a demand response.

Also flagging the number collision again (consistent with the earlier section)

Searches for "5250789" still prominently return JP 5250789 B2 (Tempal Kogyo K.K., a two-pole circuit breaker, registered 2013-04-26, published 2013-07-31) — a completely unrelated Japanese patent sharing the digits. Do not let a docket or IP-analytics platform mistake that record for US 5,250,789. Likewise, citations to "US Patent Number: 5250789" appearing in third-party product literature are prior-art citations, not litigation.

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Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant and a demand letter cites US 5,250,789, lead with the status defense, not the PTAB.
This is an expired, fee-lapsed patent. The sequence you want:

• Confirm the lapse date at USPTO Patent Center (Maintenance Fee history / "Expired – Fee Related" determination). A fee-lapsed patent cannot be infringed after lapse, and the owner's only revival path is a petition to accept late payment under 37 C.F.R. § 1.378, which becomes very hard to justify decades later.
• Run the § 286 clock. 35 U.S.C. § 286 bars recovery for infringement more than six years before the complaint is filed. A complaint filed in 2026 reaches back only to 2020 — by which time this patent was long since lapsed under either reading of the status record. That arithmetic can dispose of the case at the pleading stage.
• If the owner asserts revival or a pre-lapse damages theory, then raise invalidity — and note that you face no § 315(e)(2) estoppel, so the whole art field (Malec, Collins, Gogulski, Sutton, Humble, Mindrum/Off) is open to you in district court, plus § 101 for the business-method-flavored claims and § 112 for the "means for" recitations in claims 1–13.

2. If you are considering a defensive IPR, understand what you would and would not get.
Nothing in the statute bars an IPR against an expired patent — the Board has consistently instituted on expired claims where past damages remain in play, and it applies Phillips construction (rather than the BRI standard) to expired claims. But weigh that against § 315(b)'s one-year bar from service of a complaint, the cost of a petition, and the likelihood that a § 286 or lapse-based motion in the district court resolves the case far more cheaply. For a patent whose whole asserted window predates 2020, an IPR is usually the expensive way to win a case you can win on status.

3. If you need to verify the absence of PTAB activity independently, go to the primary sources.

• PTAB End-to-End (E2E) public search for the patent number: https://ptab.uspto.gov/ — search by patent number 5,250,789 and by patent owner "Johnsen."
• USPTO Open Data Portal / PTAB API (the source of the structured block used here): https://developer.uspto.gov/api-catalog/ptab-api.
• CourtListener for any CAFC or district-court docket naming the patent: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%225250789%22&type=o.
• USPTO Patent Public Search / Patent Center for the maintenance-fee and lapse history: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/.

4. Treat the empty PTAB record as a firm negative finding, not a gap. The structured ODP block is the canonical list and it is empty; my web searches produced no competing record. The only honest statement is: no AIA trial proceeding has ever been filed against US 5,250,789. Do not let an analytics dashboard's "5250789" hit (JP 5250789 B2, the Temparu Kogyo circuit breaker) populate a proceedings field in your deal or litigation file.

I'll search for the assignment record and any NPE/assertion activity tied to this patent.

Let me probe the assignment database and any product/company tie to the inventor.

Significant lead: the inventor is tied to Massachusetts "TRAKART" entities. Let me dig into those and check for any recorded assignment.

I hit the tool-step limit before I could open the USPTO Assignment Center record directly, so I have to be explicit about a verification gap up front (detailed in the timeline section). Here is the reconstruction from what I could confirm.

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Inventors

Pattern notes:

• Single inventor, no co-inventors. There is therefore no "all inventors departed within 12 months" signal — that pattern is structurally inapplicable here.
• Identity caveat for diligence: Massachusetts corporate records show both an "Edward L. Johnsen Sr." and an "Edward L. Johnsen Jr." associated with the same 19/5 Bent Ave., Wayland address (e.g., Trakart Marketing Services, Inc.). Any chain-of-title check should disambiguate the two individuals; the patent names only "Edward L. Johnsen."
• The inventor used many small Massachusetts entities around the same period, all now dissolved (see below). Those are commercial-vehicle signals, not assignment events — none of them appears as an assignee of record on the patent.

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Original assignee

None — the patent is owned by the individual inventor, Edward L. Johnsen.

• The patent face lists no corporate assignee. Google Patents records Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual, i.e., ownership never left the inventor via a recorded assignment (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5250789](/patent/US5250789)/en).
• Did he ship a product? No verifiable product embodying the claims is documented. What is documented is a cluster of Johnsen-led Massachusetts corporations whose names are strongly suggestive of a cart-based "Trakart" commercialization attempt, all of which are now dead:
  • Computer Promotions Corporation — 5 Bent Ave., Wayland (Johnsen President/Secretary) — Involuntary Dissolution.
  • Trakdata Corporation — 150 Speen St., Framingham — organized 1993-07-30; dissolved 1998-08-31.
  • Trakart Corporation — 150 Speen St., Framingham — organized 1995-06-14; dissolved 1998-08-31 (Johnsen President/Secretary).
  • Trakart Marketing Services, Inc. — 150 Speen St., Framingham — organized 1997-07-29; dissolved 2007-05-31 (officers: Edward L. Johnsen Sr. and Edward L. Johnsen Jr.).
• Current status of the patent: Expired. The file-history status surfaced by PlainSite (from USPTO records) is "Patent Expired Due to NonPayment of Maintenance Fees Under 37 CFR 1.362," consistent with the previously generated summary's "Expired – Fee Related," anticipated expiration 2011-10-31 (https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1eiu0k9hh/united-states-patent-and-trademark-office/shopping-cart/).
• Prosecution counsel of record (not an assignment correspondent): Robert M. Asher, with Timothy Murphy and Bruce D. Sunstein, of Bromberg & Sunstein (bromsun.com), Boston — a change of power of attorney was entered 1992-10-08. This is prosecution representation, not a recording correspondent; it does not bear on ownership and should not be read as an NPE tell.

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Assignment timeline

I found no recorded assignment for US 5,250,789, and I state that plainly:

• Verification gap (read this): I could not directly open the Assignment Center record. Two independent search passes returned patent-text, prior-art and prosecution sources, not an Assignment Center hit for patent number 5250789, and I ran out of tool steps before I could query https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (equivalently https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html, search by patent number) directly.
• What the indirect evidence shows: the ownership metadata on Google Patents lists both Original Assignee and Current Assignee as "Individual," which is the profile of a patent that was never assigned at all. Where patents have a recorded chain of title, Google Patents' assignee fields populate with the corporate names from those records.
• Conclusion: the weight of available evidence is that there are zero recorded assignments — no Assignment, Security Agreement, Merger, Change of Name, License, Release, or Correction utility. Ownership appears to have remained with Edward L. Johnsen from issuance until the patent lapsed.

Per the task instruction, where Assignment Center shows no records, the timeline ends here conceptually — I proceed only to give you the shape of the single-owner chain and to close out the signals, all of which I mark against the absence of records rather than against fabricated reel/frame entries.

No reel/frame entries exist to cite. I will not invent them.

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Timeline diagram

This renders the commercial events I could verify; none of them is a patent assignment.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5250789
    1991 : Application filed by Edward L Johnsen
    1993 : Patent issued to Johnsen as individual
    1993 : Trakdata Corporation organized
    1995 : Trakart Corporation organized
    1998 : Trakdata and Trakart dissolved
    2007 : Trakart Marketing Services dissolved
    2011 : Patent lapses for unpaid maintenance fees

Note the two 1993 and two 1998 events are each collapsed into single short labels to keep the parser happy; the underlying dates are in the tables above.

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal below is assessed against the absence of an assignment chain and the presence of only a single-inventor, individual-owner record. I flag "unclear" only where a fact genuinely cannot be resolved from what I could retrieve.

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Verdict

Insufficient data.

There is no recorded assignment to analyze — ownership of US 5,250,789 appears to have remained with the sole inventor, Edward L. Johnsen, from issuance (1993-10-05) until the patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees (anticipated expiration 2011-10-31, file status per USPTO via PlainSite: "Expired Due to NonPayment of Maintenance Fees Under 37 CFR 1.362"). No assignee — operating company, NPE, or aggregator — appears anywhere in the chain, and no assertion activity was found. This is the classic profile of a lone-inventor patent that was never commercialized or enforced, not an NPE vehicle. The strongest concrete datum in the whole file is non-ownership related: the inventor's Massachusetts entities (Trakart/Trakdata) were dissolved in 1998 and 2007 with no evident transfer of this patent.

Verification links (please run these, since I could not):

• USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search by patent number 5250789 and by "Johnsen" as assignor.
• USPTO Patent Assignment (legacy index): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents ownership metadata: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5250789/en

One correction to flag against the prior section: nothing in the earlier summary needs reversing, but note it cited only patents.google.com for ownership. The corporate-registry findings above (my own addition, from massregistry.net and city-data.com Massachusetts business-entity records) are the substantive new ownership evidence: they explain who the individual owner was commercially, and they show all those vehicles are dissolved — reinforcing the "never assigned, never asserted" reading.

I'll verify the face-of-patent citations and gather details on each reference. Let me run several searches in parallel.

Good progress on the first five. Let me pull the remaining face-of-record references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 5,250,789 (Johnsen, "Shopping cart")

Building on the earlier summary section; not repeating its bibliographic or litigation content.

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0. Scope, sources, and one controlling caveat

Sources used. The authoritative text is the patent itself (Google Patents, fetched 2026‑09‑24). Where the fetched HTML does not contain a formal "[56] References Cited" block, I cross‑checked the individual references against Google Patents / patentimages PDFs, FreePatentsOnline, and uspto.report‑style records. The references below are the ones the patent's own Background of the Invention narrates and the ones identified on the face.

Two framing points that materially affect the answer to "which claims does each reference anticipate under §102":

1. Anticipation requires a single reference to disclose every element of the claim, arranged as in the claim. Under Verdegaal, a §102 reference cannot pick up a missing element from another reference. A dependent claim incorporates its parent, so anticipating a dependent claim requires anticipating the independent claim it depends from.

2. None of the face‑of‑record citations discloses the full set of limitations of any independent claim (1, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19), and therefore none anticipates any of the dependent claims either. Every one of these references is properly a §103 (obviousness) reference, not a §‑102 anticipator. That is the honest bottom line; below I give, for each reference, its citation/date, description, the claim(s) it is most closely mapped to, and whether a §102 argument is even colorable.

A note the earlier section did not make: the most dangerous prior art for this patent is not on its face. Malec '952 and Off '672 (both discussed below) were issued years before the 1991‑10‑31 filing and are the references an examiner or challenger would build a §103 combination around.

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1. The references, one by one

(a) Gogulski — US 4,071,740

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,071,740, Mobile automated shopping system, Paul Gogulski. Filed May 26, 1976; issued Jan 31, 1978. (Appl. data corroborated by the citation table in CA 2,058,947 C.)
• Description: A shopping cart carrying a control panel with a hand‑held scanner and a second stationary scanner, a paper‑tape printer, weight‑sensing device, and multiple visual displays (product description, cost, unit price, "special" display). The cart communicates with a store central computer; purchased items are printed on tape and the cumulative total is displayed. This is cart‑mounted pre‑scanning + display + printing, coupled to a central product database.
• Claims mapped: Claims 1 (cart‑mounted data input/display), 2 (scanner), 14 (cart + display + scanner + controller), 19 (printed tape of purchased products).
• §102: No. Gogulski displays price, not a "merchandise promotion" (claim 2/14), has no coupon/discount offer, no user‑acceptance input, and no aisle‑sorting of a shopping list. It is the primary §103 base reference for claims 2 and 14 (combined with Off '672 or Malec '952).

(b) Clyne — US 4,373,133

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,373,133, Method for producing a bill, apparatus for collecting items, and a self‑service shop, Nicholas Clyne et al. Priority/filed Jan 3, 1980; issued Feb 8, 1983.
• Description: Self‑service shop item collection and automatic billing; items collected are accounted and a bill produced.
• Claims mapped: Background art to claims 1 and 19 (receipt/bill generation).
• §102: No. Produces a bill; does not disclose a bar‑coded receipt used to regenerate a shopping list, nor aisle‑sorting. §103 background only.

(c) Sutton — US 4,458,320

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,458,320, Electronic calculating device, Gordon Sutton. Issued July 3, 1984 (filing date not verified in the records returned).
• Description: The patent's own characterization: "an electronic calculator which can be mounted on a shopping cart designed specifically to assist shoppers in totalling their purchases." Auto‑accumulating item entry; tax key; multiply key (confirmed from the '320 claim text). Background press confirms Sutton commercialized it as the "Shopper's Helper" (Chicago Tribune, 1994).
• Claims mapped: Claims 1/14 (cart‑mounted electronics) — but only as a cart‑mounted calculator.
• §102: No. A calculator with no scanner, no product database, no promotion, no list organization. §103 background.

(d) Mindrum — US 4,723,212

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,723,212, Method and apparatus for dispensing discount coupons, Thomas L. Mindrum et al., assignee Catalina Marketing. Issued Feb 2, 1988. (U.S. counterpart of EP 0 173 835.)
• Description: Point‑of‑sale system that identifies a "triggering product" purchased and automatically prints a discount coupon, preferably for a different product; includes coupon validation and automatic discount application. Files: item record file, coupon look‑up file, coupon log file.
• Claims mapped: Claims 3–5, 14–17 (discount/coupon generation triggered by a purchased product, including for complementary and repeat‑purchase products).
• §102: No for claims 3–5 and 14–17 as written, because Mindrum operates at the checkout/POS, not on a shopping cart with a cart‑mounted scanner and in‑aisle display. It is the strongest §103 reference for the "promotion triggered by a scanned product" concept, to be combined with Gogulski/Sutton for the cart.

(e) Off — US 4,910,672

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,910,672, Method and apparatus for dispensing discount coupons in response to the purchase of one or more products, George W. Off et al. (continuation‑in‑part of 4,723,212). Issued Mar 20, 1990.
• Description: Adds instantly redeemable "paperless" discounts (discount applied to the bill rather than a printed coupon), multi‑item triggering, trade‑group triggering, and "negative" coupons (issued for what was not purchased). The later US 5,173,851 (1992) is the further CIP disclosing these features.
• Claims mapped: 14, 18 — critically, Off's paperless/electronic discount maps to the patent's "wireless communication means … coupons electronically stored … transmitted to the checkout register," and its remotely controlled trigger/print on‑off maps loosely to claim 18's remote promotion revision.
• §102: No. Still a POS system, not cart‑mounted; no in‑aisle scan‑triggered display. This is the reference most likely to be combined with Gogulski under §103 against claims 14/18.

(f) Humble — US 4,792,018

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,792,018, Humble et al. (issuance ~Dec 1988; exact day not verified in the records returned).
• Description (from the patent's own text): "an operator‑unattended retailing system of consumer articles wherein a shopper processes his own purchases at the point of sale."
• Claims mapped: Background to claims 1, 19.
• §102: No. Self‑service POS, no aisle‑sorted list, no receipt bar‑code rescanning. §103 background.
• Note: the Humble name also appears on US 4,676,343 (June 1987) in third‑party citation tables — do not conflate the two; the patent cites the '018 patent.

(g) Collins, Jr. — US 4,929,819

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,929,819, Collins, Jr. Issued ~May 29, 1990 (day not verified).
• Description (from the patent's own text): "an electronic module attachable to a shopping cart [that] can facilitate self service point of sale operations by pre‑scanning and accounting for selected products to be purchased during the shopping activity by the customer."
• Claims mapped: Claims 2, 14 (cart‑mounted pre‑scan + accounting). Closest structural reference to the claim‑14 cart.
• §102: No. No "merchandise promotion" and no discount offer or acceptance input. §103 partner for the cart‑mounted‑scanner limitation. (Collins was also cited by the Board alongside Gogulski in Ex parte Shimizu for cart/checkout reach.)

(h) Malec — US 4,973,952

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,973,952, Malec. Issued ~Nov 27, 1990 (day not verified).
• Description (from the patent's own text): "Video advertising … present on some shopping carts [that] beep and change advertisements when the shopping cart passes by an 'advertised' product on a shelf. Malec also features 'paperless/electronic' coupons which get applied to a customer's order at the point of sale."
• Claims mapped: Claims 2, 3, 14, 18 — this is the single most on‑point reference for "advertisement/promotion presented on a cart‑mounted display in the aisle in response to a product."
• §102: This is the closest thing to an anticipator, but it still is not one. The decisive gap: Malec triggers on a shelf proximity beacon as the cart passes, whereas claims 2 and 14 require the promotion to be "responsive to codes scanned by said scanner." That is a genuine, arguable difference (though a challenger would call it an obvious substitution → §103 over Malec in view of Gogulski/Collins). Malec also lacks the aisle‑sorted list of claim 1 and the explicit user‑acceptance input of claim 14.

(i) Bianco — US 5,047,614

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,047,614, Bianco. Issued ~Sep 10, 1991 (day and title not verified in the records returned).
• Description: Cited in the same general field of computer‑aided/assisted shopping.
• Claims mapped: Background to claims 1 (computer‑aided shopping assistance).
• §102: No on the record available to me; treat as §103 background. I did not verify this reference's title/content to a high confidence and flag it as such.

(j) Hunt — US 5,111,196

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,111,196, Hunt. Issued ~May 5, 1992 (date and title not verified).
• Description: Unverified. I could not confirm the subject matter from the records returned.
• §102: Cannot be assessed — I will not assert a title or content I cannot confirm. Flagged as an open item requiring a direct USPTO full‑text pull.

(k) Tannehill — US 5,158,310

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 5,158,310, Tannehill. Issued ~Oct 27, 1992 (date and title not verified).
• Description: Unverified (issued after the 1991‑10‑31 filing; relevant only if earlier‑filed/earlier‑published subject matter qualifies).
• §102: Cannot be assessed on available records. Flagged as an open item.

(l) Baus — US 4,750,151

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,750,151, Baus (issuance ~June 1988; exact day/title not verified).
• Description: Unverified. My searches for a Baus reference in this field returned a different Baus patent in the same area — US 4,780,599, "Method and apparatus for directing an existing product code to a remote location" (issued Oct 1988) — which is a product‑code/remote‑database reference plausibly relevant to the patent's central‑computer price/product lookup. I could not confirm that '151 is that patent or a companion to it.
• §102: Cannot be assessed; do not treat '151 and '599 as interchangeable without pulling both full texts from USPTO.

(m) Yourick — US 4,775,935

• Full citation: U.S. Pat. No. 4,775,935, Yourick. Issued ~Oct 4, 1988 (date and title not verified).
• Description: Unverified from the records returned.
• §102: Cannot be assessed. Flagged as an open item.

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2. Bottom line by claim

No face‑of‑record citation anticipates any claim of US 5,250,789 under 35 U.S.C. §102. Each is an obviousness (§103) reference. The patent's validity, if challenged, would rise or fall on whether a cart‑mounted scanner + in‑aisle promotion display (Gogulski/Collins) in view of scan/POS‑triggered coupon generation (Mindrum/Off) and cart‑mounted triggered advertising (Malec) renders the independent claims obvious.

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3. Verification status and caveats (so this is not overstated)

• Verified with reasonable confidence via records returned: Gogulski '740, Clyne '133, Sutton '320, Mindrum '212, Off '672; and (content only, from the patent's own narrative) Humble '018, Collins '819, Malec '952.
• Cited by the patent but dates/titles I could not fully verify: Baus '151, Yourick '935, Bianco '614, Hunt '196, Tannehill '310. I have deliberately not invented titles, dates, or subject matter for these. To complete the §102/§103 table rigorously, pull the full texts and front‑page [56]/[45] data for each directly from USPTO Patent Public Search / Patent Center (and confirm the correct Baus reference — do not assume '151 = 4,780,599).
• Kind of citation: the fetched page did not expose the examiner‑cited vs. applicant‑cited breakpoint, so I have not asserted which of these were examiner citations. The summary section's list should be treated as the face‑of‑record set.
• §102 vs §103: if your objective is to identify anticipators, the answer is "none"; if it is to identify the references that matter, the ranked list is Malec '952 (cart ad) → Off '672 / Mindrum '212 (coupon generation) → Gogulski '740 / Collins '819 (cart scanner), with Sutton '320 as the cart‑calculator background and Humble '018 / Clyne '133 as self‑service‑billing background.

I'll close a few verification gaps on the unverified face-of-record references before reasoning about combinations, since their content bears directly on which claim sets are exposed.

Two gaps closed (Yourick '935 = video merchandising; Hunt '196 = electronic shelf-label / price-lookup field). Let me try to pin down Hunt '196 and Tannehill '310 titles directly.

Obviousness Analysis — US 5,250,789 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Builds on the Prior-Art section above (reference descriptions, dates, and the § 102 "none anticipate" finding are not repeated here). Two verification gaps from that section are now partially closed and are flagged in § 7.

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1. Legal framework and the two facts that shape everything

Governing standard. Because the application was filed 1991‑10‑31, pre‑AIA § 103(a) applies. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), nonetheless controls the analysis: the question is whether the claimed subject matter would have been obvious at the time of invention, judged under Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), considering (1) scope/content of the prior art, (2) differences between the prior art and the claims, (3) level of ordinary skill, and (4) objective indicia. A combination may be obvious with no express teaching to combine — "design incentives and other market forces" suffice — but the challenger must still articulate a reason with a rational underpinning why a POSITA would have made the combination (In re Kahn; MPEP 2143). References are read as a whole and may not be attacked individually (In re Keller).

Fact 1 — the applicant supplied much of his own prior art. The Background section of US 5,250,789 narrates, in the applicant's own words, the entire state of the art in 1991: cart-mounted calculators (Sutton '320), cart-mounted video advertising triggered as a cart passes a product (Malec '952), cart-mounted POS modules for pre-scanning (Gogulski '740, Collins '819), POS coupon issuance and paperless discounts (Mindrum '212, Off '672), product-finder directory kiosks, instant on-shelf coupon machines, and price-checking kiosks. Statements in a specification describing the prior art are usable as prior art against the applicant (In re Nomiya, 509 F.2d 566 (CCPA 1975); Riverwood Int'l v. R.A. Jones, 324 F.3d 1346 (Fed. Cir. 2003)). The § 103 case against this patent is therefore built substantially from the patent's own admission of what the industry was already doing in the aisle — which undercuts the single strongest nonobviousness theme available to the owner ("nobody combined promotion with a cart-display before the sale").

Fact 2 — the level of ordinary skill is modest, and the specification says so. The patent states that "[o]ne of ordinary skill in the art may select an appropriate microprocessor." A reasonable articulation: a person with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer science (or equivalent), plus 2–4 years of experience in retail point‑of‑sale, in‑store display, or data-collection systems; familiar with UPC bar-code scanning, POS controller/database architecture, database look‑up and list sorting, and simple wireless (RF/IR) in‑store data links. This POSITA is not required to invent new hardware, only to assemble known subsystems — which materially raises the obviousness exposure on every independent claim.

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2. Claim 1 and its dependents (claims 1–13): aisle-ordered shopping list

The earlier section correctly reports that no face‑of‑record reference discloses store-location look‑up plus re‑ordering a list into location order. That does not end the § 103 inquiry, because claim 1's four elements were each independently known and the combination is the kind of "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions" that KSR condemns.

Motivation to combine: time and step-saving for the shopper, expressly asserted by the inventor as the object of the invention. That is a classic "known technique (sorting by location) applied to a known device (a cart-borne or handheld directory), yielding the predictable result of a walk-order list." The applicant himself frames the problem as one of shopper efficiency; § 103 does not permit him to claim the automation of the manual list-organization practice he admitted existed.

Dependents:

• Claims 2–5 (scanner-triggered promotion; coupon; complementary; repeat-purchase) — see the claim 14–17 analysis immediately below; they rise and fall with the same combination, plus Mindrum '212 (coupon for a different product in response to a purchase — claim 4's exact premise) and Off '672 (multi-item/"one or more products" triggering — claim 5).
• Claims 6–7 (user input + printer) — Gogulski '740 (cart control panel; paper-tape printer) + Sutton '320 (cart keypad). Mounting a keypad and a printer on a cart-carried terminal is a predictable I/O addition.
• Claims 8–10 (coupon list; flag matching list items; flag matching scanned products) — the admitted manual practice (Background: shopping lists "may be marked to indicate items that have an accompanying coupon"; UPC codes "are also found on merchandise coupons") + Mindrum '212/Off '672's coupon look‑up file + the cart scanner of Gogulski/Collins. Claim 9 is the single easiest claim to invalidate in the patent, because the claim recites (in electronic form) precisely the manual annotation the applicant admitted was already routine.
• Claims 11–12 (disk drive; cart mounting) — home‑PC/floppy data exchange was conventional in 1991 (admitted by the spec), and Gogulski '740 / Collins '819 / Sutton '320 each mount electronics on a cart. Claim 12's cart limitation is the least innovative element in the patent.
• Claim 13 (price database + wireless updates) — strongest art-supported dependent claim to invalidate. Wireless, centrally-updated in‑store price/information displays were known: Hunt '5,111,196 (see § 7) and the electronic shelf-label line it belongs to (e.g., Sundelin 4,002,886, describing wires or "electromagnetic transmission and reception"; Gomersall 4,500,880; H.E. Butt 4,766,295, an infrared wireless shelf‑tag pricing system driven by a store main computer). Malec '952 supplies the cart‑mounted wireless receiving display, and Gogulski '740 supplies the cart‑to‑store‑computer architecture. Motivation: the patent itself states the purpose — the store "may make a price change at any time … and transmit them to all of the display systems," avoiding stale cart prices. Substituting a wireless link for manual/docked updating is a predictable design choice under KSR ("use of a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way").

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3. Claims 14–18: the cart merchandising family (the commercial heart)

This is where the strongest § 103 case lies, and where the prior art is most densely stacked.

3.1 Claim 14 — the "scan a product, get an offer, accept it in the aisle" claim

Elements: (i) shopping cart; (ii) programmable display on cart; (iii) controller; (iv) product code scanner; (v) promotion including a discount offer displayed in response to a scanned product code; (vi) user-activated input to accept the offer.

Primary combination (highest-confidence): Malec '952 + Gogulski '740 (or Collins '819) + Mindrum '212 / Off '672.

Why a POSITA would combine them (the articulation that matters):

1. Same field, same problem, same hardware. All four references are in retail in‑store promotion and product identification. Malec and Mindrum/Off exist to influence which product the shopper buys (Malec's ads and paperless coupons; Mindrum's "triggering product" coupons). Gogulski/Collins exist to place the identification of products on the cart. Combining a cart-borne product-code reader with a cart-borne promotion display requires no new subsystem: the scanner the cart already carries for price-checking and running totals (Gogulski, Collins) is reused as the promotion trigger. Reusing an existing input for an additional disclosed function is the paradigm of predictable combination.
2. The references themselves supply the motivation. Malec already teaches that the promotion should be presented against a product-associated stimulus while the shopper is at the shelf. Mindrum/Off teach that the stimulus can be a product code. The only difference is which product-identifying signal triggers the display — and KSR holds that "the substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results" is obvious. A shelf beacon and a scanned UPC are two known ways of identifying the same thing: the product in front of the shopper.
3. Market pressure and industry trend, documented in the applicant's own admission. The Background chronicles the industry's migration of promotion from home to the aisle: shelf-talkers, shelf-mounted instant coupon machines, coupon kiosks, price-check kiosks. A POSITA in 1991 had every incentive to move coupon issuance (Mindrum/Off, then POS-only) upstream to the moment of product selection. That is exactly a "design incentive … market force" rationale under KSR.
4. Reasonable expectation of success. Each subsystem had been commercially deployed (Sutton's cart calculator; Mindrum's POS coupon printer; Malec's cart advertising). There is no technical incompatibility; the combination is a matter of integration, and KSR expressly permits combining known elements where the results are predictable.
5. The acceptance input is not a point of novelty. Off '672 already requires a mechanism for a paperless discount to be applied to a customer's order, and a keypad "accept" button is the most predictable UI for that. The specification's own description ("the shopper will then be encouraged to interact with the display to select a coupon if desired") confirms this is interaction design, not invention.

Secondary line of attack against claim 14: Yourick '5,775,935 — U.S. Pat. No. 4,775,935, "Video merchandising system with variable and adaptive product sequence presentation order" (Oct. 4, 1988) (now verified — see § 7). Yourick is a merchandising display system that adapts the sequence of promotional presentations it shows. Combined with Gogulski/Collins (cart scanner/display) and Malec (cart advertising), Yourick supplies the "programmable display whose promotions vary according to product‑selection sequence" concept, and supplies a further motivation: choosing the promotion based on what the shopper has selected.

3.2 Claims 15–17

• Claim 15 (printer prints coupon on acceptance): Mindrum '212 (coupon dispenser/printer) + Gogulski '740 (cart-mounted printer). A cart-mounted thermal printer for shopper-selected coupons is a predictable mechanization of the same offer/accept flow. Obvious.
• Claim 16 (complementary product): Mindrum '212 above all. Mindrum's core embodiment issues a coupon in response to a first product for a different product; complementary pairing (its own example is a related-product coupon) is the stated purpose. Combined with the cart scanner/display of Gogulski/Malec, claim 16 is the closest thing to a single-reference-plus-cart shortfall in the patent — the only missing element is where the display sits (the aisle rather than the register belt). Adding an in‑aisle cart display to a known complementary-coupon generator, when Malec already discloses an in‑aisle cart promotional display, is obvious. Also note the patent's own FIG. 8 example (coffee → second can) and the tuna → mayonnaise example are the classic complementary pairings that Mindrum-type programs used.
• Claim 17 (additional purchases of the same product): Off '672 (triggering on "the purchase of one or more products"; multi-item triggers) plus the ubiquitous "cents off your next purchase" coupon convention. The applicant's own FIG. 8 (buy one can of coffee, get a coupon for a second) is a standard "multi-buy" promotional structure. Obvious.

3.3 Claim 18 — wireless revision of promotions

Elements: cart + display + controller + scanner + promotion + wireless means for receiving a revised promotion.

Combination: Off '672 (remotely alterable promotion parameters) + Malec '952 (wirelessly actuated cart display) + Gogulski '740 (store central computer ↔ cart) + ESL-art wireless update (Hunt '196-field; H.E. Butt '295 infra).

• Motivation: the store/manufacturer must be able to change promotions without recalling or manually servicing each cart; the patent itself says the promotion table "may be changed by the store's central computer through the wireless communications."
• Expectation of success: the ESL art had already implemented central‑computer wireless updates to hundreds of in‑store remote displays. Substituting a wireless link for a wired or manual update is the classic predictable variation.

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4. Claims 19–22: the bar-coded-receipt list method

This is the weakest independent claim for a § 103 attack on the art currently of record, and I want to be candid about it rather than overreach.

Claim 19 requires four steps, the critical one being printing a receipt that lists the goods and bar codes corresponding to those goods. On the face of the record:

• Clyne '133 and Gogulski '740 supply itemized printed transaction records/paper tapes of purchased products.
• Baus 4,780,599 (Oct. 1988, "Method and apparatus for directing an existing product code to a remote location") is the closer product‑code‑handling reference in the field (the earlier section rightly warns against conflating it with Baus '151, which I still have not verified).
• The catalog-scanning and home-computer list aspects are admitted prior art in the applicant's own specification and FIG. 5 (a store catalog carrying UPC codes).

The gap: I have not identified, on the face of the record or in my searches, a reference that expressly prints UPC bar codes onto a customer receipt. The obviousness case therefore has to be built as: (itemized receipt printing art (Clyne/Gogulski) or a bar-coded ticket/record) + the admitted practice of putting UPC codes on scannable documents (coupons; the store catalog of FIG. 5) + ordinary skill in optical reading of printed codes, with the motivation being reorder convenience — eliminating manual transcription of frequently purchased staples, which is the very rationale the patent states ("shoppers which tend to purchase the same items on a regular basis may scan their shopping receipts"). A POSITA who already scans UPC codes off catalogs, coupons, and shelves would find printing those same codes on the receipt the customer already receives to be an obvious extension of a known practice. But this is a weaker, more inferential case than the claim 14–18 attack, and it would be materially strengthened by a dedicated search for receipt-code printing art (see § 7).

Claims 20–22 are straightforwardly obvious:

• Claim 20 (scan catalog bar codes) — stated in the specification as an available option (FIG. 5); admitted prior art.
• Claim 21 (scan coupon bar codes) — the specification states "UPC product codes are also found on merchandise coupons," and describes scanning coupon bar codes; admitted prior art.
• Claim 22 (store the list on a floppy disk) — the specification describes exactly this (home computer → floppy disk 68 → cart); admitted prior art plus the conventionality of floppy storage in 1991.

These three dependent claims are essentially the specification's own description of the prior-art options repackaged as claim language.

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5. Ranked invalidity theory (what I would actually chart first)

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6. Anticipated patent-owner rebuttals — and why they are weak here

1. "Each reference is a checkout system; ours is a shopper-assist/promotion system — different problems." KSR forecloses this as a categorical argument; the references share the field and the express objective of influencing product choice (Malec, Mindrum, Off) or of using cart-borne identification (Gogulski, Collins). Moreover, the applicant's own Background admits the industry was already moving promotion into the aisle.
2. "No motivation to add a scanner trigger when Malec uses shelf beacons." Disclosure of a different mechanism is not teaching away; "a known alternative is not a teaching away absent a criticality or disabling disclosure" (In re Gurley; Medichem v. Rolabo). Malec neither disparages scanning nor makes beacon triggering essential.
3. "The invention was a commercial success." There is no evidence of commercial success in the record — the Johnsen entities (Computer Promotions Corp., Trakdata, Trakart, Trakart Marketing Services) are all dissolved, and the patent lapsed for non‑payment of maintenance fees in 2011. Absence of nexus is not itself evidence of obviousness, but there is no objective indicia in this file to weigh against the art. A challenger should note this and not concede a prima facie case.
4. "Later cart-advertising products copied the invention." This is the one secondary-consideration argument with theoretical force (the 435 "Cited By" references include Telxon, Symbol, IBM, Klever, and Media Cart cart-display families). But heavy citation of a patent as background art is consistent with independent development, and no record evidence of copying from Johnsen has been identified. The earlier sections' finding of no assignment, no licensing, and no litigation makes a copying/narrative case hard to build.
5. "Means‑plus‑function claims must be construed narrowly to the disclosed structure." Even if construed under pre‑AIA § 112 ¶ 6 to the keypad/disk drive/scanner/data port, the challenger charts each alternative disclosed — the specification itself lists them, so this cuts against the owner: it provides four separate structures, any one of which is conventional.

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7. Verification status, corrections, and open items

Newly corroborated since the Prior-Art section:

• Yourick 4,775,935 — now verified by its PDF cover page as "Video merchandising system with variable and adaptive product sequence presentation order," issued Oct. 4, 1988 (US4775935). This materially upgrades Yourick from an unknown into a usable § 103 reference for claims 2, 14, 16, 17, and 18.
• Hunt 5,111,196 — partially verified: issued May 5, 1992; Justia catalogues it within the electronic‑ink/electronic shelf‑label and in‑store information display lineage, and the Ex parte Goodwin Board decision cites Hunt 5,111,196 alongside Gomersall in the electronic shelf label / price look‑up table field. One secondary source (uspto.report) renders its title as "Electronic information display module and connector therefor" — I flag this as moderate confidence only. Because it is an electronic shelf-label/information-display reference, it is the most promising face‑of‑record source for claim 13's wireless‑updated price data. Pull the full text (and the front page) from USPTO before relying on it.
• No correction needed to the prior section's core finding: none of the cited references anticipates any claim; all are § 103 references. My addition is that the applicant's own Background functions as an independent prior-art source and supplies most of the motivation-to-combine rationale.

Still unverified / open (do not treat as established):

• Tannehill 5,158,310 — could not verify title or content. Note a timing issue: it issued Oct. 27, 1992, after the 1991‑10‑31 filing. It can qualify as prior art only as pre‑AIA § 102(e) art (i.e., on a showing that its application was filed before the applicant's invention date) or via § 102(a)/(b) if published or publicly used earlier. Verify before citing.
• Baus 4,750,151 — unverified. My searches for "Baus 4,750,151" returned only unrelated Goodyear tire patents by an Andre E. J. Baus and the litigation Baus v. Copony (1918 railroad-shipping interference) — none of which is the reference on this patent. Do not substitute Baus 4,780,599 ("Method and apparatus for directing an existing product code to a remote location," Oct. 1988) for '151 without pulling both texts.
• Bianco 5,047,614 — unverified; I did not find a confirmed title.
• Hunt 5,111,196's exact title and disclosure — see above.

Search gaps that would strengthen (or defeat) the § 103 case, in priority order:

1. Store-directory / product-locator art pre‑1991 — this is what nails claim 1's "first database means for identifying a location." The applicant admitted these kiosks existed; a specific reference should be charted.
2. Receipt-printing-with-bar-codes and reorder-list art pre‑1991 — the missing piece for claim 19.
3. Electronic shelf-label / wireless price-update art pre‑1991 — the missing piece for claim 13 and supporting claim 18.
4. Cart-mounted scanner + display art beyond Gogulski/Collins/Sutton.
5. A full [56] reference-cited pull to confirm which of the twelve references were examiner-cited (§ 102(b)/§ 103 previously considered) versus applicant-cited — this affects how a challenger frames the "new" art it brings.

Two housekeeping notes:

• The date discrepancy flagged in the earlier sections persists (this task states April 26, 2026; the operating context gives 2026‑10‑01). It does not affect any § 103 conclusion, which is governed by the 1991 filing date.
• Per the strict-interpretation rule, all identifiers above were read literally, and the earlier sections' warning still holds: do not let JP 5250789 B2 (Tempal Kogyo, two-pole circuit breaker) populate an art-search field for this patent.

Bottom line: Claims 2–5, 9–10, 13–18 are exposed to strong § 103 combinations built on Malec '952 + Gogulski '740/Collins '819 + Mindrum '212/Off '672 (+ Hunt‑field wireless price-update art for claim 13, and Yourick '935 as supporting art). Claim 1 is exposed to a well-supported obviousness case once a specific store-directory reference is charted, given the applicant's own admissions. Claims 19–22 face a moderate case on claim 19 (no single reference teaches a bar‑coded receipt) and strong cases on claims 20–22, which essentially restate the specification's admissions. No claim is anticipated; every independent claim has at least one gap that requires an explicit motivation-to-combine articulation, and the applicant's own Background supplies most of that articulation.