The technology is available and the costs are reasonable (tag prices are close five to eight cents each) but it appears that basket-at-once scanning is far from being adopted at retail. The main problem is the lack of a logical and cost-effective way to get the tags onto the products themselves.
Himanshu Bhatt, global solutions executive and program director for IBM sensors and actuators, told Retail Customer Experience, the bi-monthly trade publication, that a branded apparel retailer, which does its own manufacturing and "have their own captive supply chain," might be able to affix RFID tags as the last step in the private label manufacturing process.
But stores selling multiple apparel brands have the challenge of getting all those multiple suppliers tagging products themselves. A multiple-brand apparel retailer could put on the tags themselves but would lose all the benefits those tags provide down the supply chain. That dilutes the overall value proposition in moving toward such RFID technology.
"In my estimation, it will be some time before we see it," said Jason Goldberg, vice president of marketing at retail design firm MTI. "Way before every product for sale in a store is source-tagged, you'll see some retailers manually tagging SKUs, and the stores most likely to do it are niche specialty retailers that won't benefit from cart-at-once scanning."
Indeed, a much longer wait is expected for supermarkets, which stand to benefit the most from basket-scanning technology. The channel faces the challenge of not only affixing tags to thousands of items, but RFID technology still has some problems reading multiple items in tight spaces that are typical of a grocery shopping basket.
"The retail industry wants to utilize the UHF/EPC technology because of the distance-reading characteristics, but the laws of physics still keep the RFID world in check," Tom Napier, who developed a successful RFID application to handle the check-in and check-out of documents for a Canadian government agency, told Retail Customer Experience. For instance, if you have two RFID-enabled credit cards in your wallet, he said, neither one will work on a contactless terminal because they interfere with one another.
"The same will hold true with UHF tags," he said. "If one item's tag is too close to another, both are useless as tracking devices. Combine that with water and other metals, and a basket of goods will be very difficult to scan 100 percent of the time."
Discussion Questions: Do you think the potential benefits of basket-scanning warrant the pursuit of a technology solution given all the hurdles? Do you expect it will eventually happen with RFID or do we need to wait for another technology to come along?