PADERBORN, Germany — It’s one of the Holy Grails of retail: A shopper fills her cart with groceries, rolls up to a check-out counter, and virtually instantly, without a single item being taken out of the cart, the groceries are itemized and their prices totaled.
RFID technology is currently the best technological bet to make that dream a reality. But exactly when it will happen is a matter of no small contention.
Even on the floor of Wincor World, the annual trade fair sponsored by Wincor Nixdorf, there is a gaping chasm between the optimism of some, who put the advent of the technology at about 10 years out, and the belief of at least one Wincor executive, who in essence says not in our lifetime.
Score one for the optimists. Maybe. Wincor Nixdorf, in partnership with IT component manufacturer Wanzel, has developed a prototype grocery cart called the RFID-Tango. According to Wanzel spokesman Rainer Eckert, the cart and its software platform will go a long way to bringing about instant checkout.
The problem solved by the RFID-Tango is called bulk-reading. RFID chips broadcast their signal a thousand times a second. One reader attempting to comprehend multiple pings at once can get confused. (Imagine trying to digest a dozen overheard conversations at once.) The bulk-reading solution developed by Wanzel manages to tell voices to “shut up” when it has finished reading them. It can manage up to a 100 items in one cart, reexamining the set of signals constantly for additional items and to detect whether any items have been removed from the cart.
Eckert admits the remaining challenges are not insignificant.
First, as has been discussed ad nauseum in stories about RFID adoption, the price of transmitters must come down. Currently, chips are under four cents each, with a 24-bit chip. The goal is to get them under two cents, which would make the technology less costly than barcode printing, which costs about two cents per package, owing to the exacting standards of bar width and readability.
In addition, current transmitters are metal-based, which limits the recyclability of the package. The goal is to make them polymer-based. Then, not only will the transmitters be recyclable, they can be imprinted onto the package as part of the offset printing process.
Finally, retailers and RFID component manufacturers must agree on standards such as naming conventions and broadcast guidelines, as well as develop and roll-out a mammoth data transmission and storage infrastructure.
In about a decade, Eckert believes, those problems will be solved, in a process similar to the one that eventually enabled barcode scanning. But whether that's in five years or 10 or 15, he’s confident we'll live to see it.
