June 16, 2025
Is RFID Finally Reinventing Retail Selling Floors?
Academy Sports, Old Navy, and Kroger have all recently rolled out RFID projects to improve inventory accuracy at the store level.
On its first-quarter analyst call, Academy Sports officials indicated that the company has been rolling out RFID scanners to all stores this spring, leveraging RFID chips already embedded in products from key brands such as Nike, Jordan, and Adidas, to update store inventories on a weekly basis.
“When we highlighted this technology in 70 stores last year, it led to a 20% improvement in store-level inventory accuracy,” CEO Steve Lawrence told analysts. “Rolling this technology to all stores will help improve our in-stocks, which ultimately will lead to increases in conversion.”
In late March, Old Navy announced a phased rollout of RADAR’s AI-powered RFID technology to provide store associates with real-time inventory information to locate items anywhere on the sales floor or in the backroom. Associates are not only able to help in-store customers find products, but also more quickly replenish shelves and fulfill omnichannel orders.
Haio Barbeito, Old Navy’s president and CEO, said in a statement, “This new technology can place power in the hands of our frontline teams to better serve our customers.”
Kroger last fall partnered with Avery Dennison to add RFID-embedded labels across its baked goods offerings to maximize freshness and reduce waste. Jordan Poff, VP of retail operations at Kroger, said in a statement that the technology will “improve inventory visibility, which means products will be on the shelves when our customers want them, while enabling our associates to spend more time with our customers.”
Adoption of RFID on selling floors has been increasing as costs have come down for RFID chips and readers, as well as due to mandates on suppliers to add RFID tags to products from Target, Walmart, Metro AG, Tesco, and others. Technological advancements have also shrunk the size of tags to make them less noticeable on products while improving their accuracy. Additionally, standards have been established to better ensure information security.
Item-level RFID has also been promoted for its potential to combat shrink and better manage ship-from-store and BOPIS.
Optimum Retailing’s white paper, “What Retailers Need to Know About AI-powered RFID Right Now,” focused on the potential of RFID to leverage artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to capitalize on the vast item-level data RFID produces, including offering personalized recommendations based on the items customers pick up in the store.
Bill Hardgrave, founder of Auburn University’s RFID Lab and president of the University of Memphis, said in the report, “RFID increases inventory accuracy from an average of 65% to more than 95%. And high inventory accuracy can lead to increased sales — but only if retailers use the data to improve their operations and processes.”
BrainTrust
Jamie Diamond
Founder, Jamie Diamond PR
Shep Hyken
Chief Amazement Officer, Shepard Presentations, LLC
Frank Margolis
Executive Director, Growth Marketing & Business Development, Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Do you expect to see wider adoption of item-level RFID across retail selling floors in 2025, and how might use cases evolve beyond inventory accuracy?
How much potential do you see for artificial intelligence to enhance the impact of RFID in retail environments?
Poll
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RFID is one of the genuinely sensible technologies that can make a big difference to a retail business. While it has often been employed in stock control and allowing people to pay quickly (think Uniqlo and Zara self-checkout), it has a lot of other uses in terms of allowing inventory to be tracked, picked, and counted. All of these things improve efficiency and accuracy, and they can be also used to understand how customers shop stores.
Everything that fellow Braintrust member Neil Saunders said is 100% true. I’d also add that tracking in-store inventory is great, but also knowing about inventory in other stores can be helpful when a store is out of stock. An out-of-stock item available in another store is a sale and delivery waiting to happen.
RFID+AI is like peanut butter and jelly and its going to take over the entire supply chain from the moment a product is born to when its purchased and returned and re-sold and recycled – this is knowing everything all the time without scanning anything ever again.
The use case scenarios that make RFID valuable continue to increase, while the cost of the technology continues to fall. That combination of factors means that the ability for retailers and manufacturers to finally gain the full measure of value from this technology finally appears imminent. From inventory accuracy to improved store efficiencies, and from omnichannel order fulfillment to brand insights, that ROI business case for technology has begun to arrive. What’s interesting however is that Apparel was not the category that I thought would lead the way on this topic. Surely Food & Beverage, as well as CPG, would be the categories with the earliest adoption, but that is not necessarily what our industry is seeing. However it arrives, the mainstream adoption of RFID has finally begun to arrive, and the benefit for retailers, consumer brands, and consumers appears right in front of us…finally.
RFID will likely have its mass market acceptance relatively soon – but its cost (both from a device and labor standpoint) will limit its application beyond Specialty/Apparel retail, with likely low to no grocery penetration.
Item-level RFID adoption is projected to rise in 2025, improving customer experiences, simplifying checkout, and enhancing loss prevention. Retailers can also use RFID for personalized marketing, real-time tracking, and seamless omnichannel integration, boosting efficiency and sales.
It sure took long enough…but item-level RFID is absolutely revolutionizing the way retail works.
Great point on the timing! We have been talking about RFID for more than 20 year. Back in 2003, Walmart mandated the use of RFID tags on cases and pallets from its top suppliers. With the costs of tags becoming more reasonable and the numerous benefits of item level tagging, hopefully, RFID will become more pervasive. Beyond the reduction of labor for inventory counting, accurate inventory records will help eliminate the need for safety stock for online order replenishment. Let’s go RFID!
Item-level RFID is a very meaningful improvement for PART of the retail business, not the whole thing. It’s important to keep in mind that it is far less appropriate for fast-moving consumer goods than it is for soft lines, electronics, and housewares.
The tags have become far more economical and functional, but they’re still not great on metallic items or containers filled with liquids, which can absorb and reflect the radio signals. And it seems wasteful to stick them on cereal boxes destined for landfills a week after purchase – while there are other viable options for in-store sensing and automated re-ordering.
Item-level inventory visibility is indeed bringing game-changing benefits in many departments, but in a full-spectrum supercenter or a large hardware store, RFID is only a partial solution. In a C-store or a small grocer, it may be irrelevant.
for RFID all of the main roads lead back to Inventory accuracy and the shortest time to fulfillment from time of order. Retailers will spend the next few years perfecting The benefits of inventory accuracy that RFID can bring. There will be some fringe use cases in the mean time but Inventory accuracy is the short term , and very large benefit, of RFID. Inventory accuracy leads to less labor on fulfillment, less inventory on hand, increased sales, and a long lost of other benefits. RFID will bridge the gap between low shrink and truly accurate inventory at the UPC level.
For a business that is as data hungry and data reliant as retail, it’s odd that it took as long as it did to reach this level of deployment. Was it an ROI thing, or wasn’t it a shiny enough bauble to get the attention it really deserved? I mean, how many decades old is the technology? And it’s only now becoming cost effective…???
More than twenty years ago, in 2003, I experienced Metro’s “Store of the Future,” showcasing RFID among other new technologies. What we’re realizing today is the journey from technological possibility to economic viability. Cost curves are finally reaching a critical mass, with the cost of tags and readers plummeting, accompanied by a reduction in the total cost of ownership. The COVID period transformed inventory accuracy from nice-to-have to a must-have. Retailers couldn’t afford 65% accuracy when customers expected ship-from-store fulfillment in hours, not days. After years of upstream supplier mandates from Walmart, Target, and other retailers, as well as investments from brands like Nike and Adidas, retailers (such as Academy Sports) can now inherit pre-tagged inventory rather than bearing the costs of tagging. We’ve also evolved from nightmarish custom implementations to API-based solutions that plug into existing ERP infrastructure in weeks rather than months. Lastly, RFID was always able to deliver better inventory counts, but today AI transforms that accuracy into predictive insights, personalized recommendations, promotion optimization, and automated replenishment. Today, there is exponentially more value creation and capture from that RFID data.
Transformative technologies often languish for long periods until multiple constraints are lifted, enabling rapid adoption and widespread implementation. RFID exemplifies this pattern – retailers are overcoming the operational and economic barriers that had hindered its true potential. We’ve evolved beyond simple inventory counts to understanding retail physics—the fundamental forces governing how products, people, and profits interact in physical space, moving from a better inventory paradigm to behavioral insights and predictive commerce.
I have worked with RFID in the retail environment intermittently for nearly 15 years. Continuously, it seems that RFID technology is approximately two to three years away from becoming mainstream. Numerous issues have hindered its widespread adoption, such as building layout challenges, including very thick walls in older buildings. I recall having a conversation with a colleague about 15 years ago regarding the possibility of using individual RFID codes in a grocery store environment to determine precisely where a customer picked up an item. This capability would be particularly useful for products promoted in multiple locations within the store.
Certainly, the advent of artificial intelligence offers significant potential for enhancing RFID technology by increasing the number of use cases and potentially enabling the forward deployment of inventory—from the backroom to the store floor—based on AI predictions.
However, RFID is only one aspect of the overall smart store or IoT-connected store. This technology also appears to be about two to three years away from mainstream adoption and has been for many years. The concept of having a real-time digital twin of store operations is highly appealing, as it would allow real-time merchandising decisions to improve overall business performance. Nevertheless, the costs of both hardware and software need to continue declining. There is an analogy that I heard some time ago: this type of technology is akin to a road bridge over a river—everyone wants to benefit from it, but no one wants to bear the cost themselves.
RFID is finally starting to show its real value on the store floor. What stands out is how retailers are using it not just for visibility but to support daily store operations like faster replenishment, better fulfillment, and fewer gaps between online and offline inventory.
What’s working now is the mix of better tech, lower costs, and real use cases that help store teams, not just dashboards. The next step will be using that accurate data to actually improve planning and customer experience, not just count stock better.
I’ve made so many bets on RFID finally hitting the tipping point that I’m a bit gunshy to be honest. The business benefits have never been in question. The issue has been cost, process changes, and change management. I agree that the barriers for adoption over the years have been eroding. It certainly feels like the last barrier is managing change.
I have been advocating for item-level RFID tagging for approximately ten years, When retailers piggyback all the benefits of RFID tagging, the decision should be a no-brainer:
Unit Inventory AccuracyInventory takingSales floor replenishmentSecurity/LPSelf-checkoutall leading to increased sales and customer satisfaction. The remaining hurdle is to get all manufacturers to agree to attach RFID tags to all their product, at the source of manufacture. It could not happen too soon!
It’s exciting to see RFID evolve from Walmart pilots decades ago to a retail staple that improves trading partners’ operations. More retail stakeholders will invest in RFID infrastructure to improve in-store and supply chain visibility, inventory management and the customer experience.
Item-level RFID has tremendous potential at the store level, specifically with respect to customer service and personalization. AI has the power to combine tracking, heat mapping, customer profiling, and product data to transform the customer experience in physical stores the same way the AI has transformed ECM.
RFID use has been largely binary. If detect no product A then get more product A. Or similar single trick applications.
With AI, RFID can improve decision making. The added capabilities of AI and RFID combined, properly exploited (not a small challenge in existing organizations), makes a lot of sense.
New and even existing technologies often need a partner to gain widespread adoption. RFID benefits greatly from AI.
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RFID is one of the genuinely sensible technologies that can make a big difference to a retail business. While it has often been employed in stock control and allowing people to pay quickly (think Uniqlo and Zara self-checkout), it has a lot of other uses in terms of allowing inventory to be tracked, picked, and counted. All of these things improve efficiency and accuracy, and they can be also used to understand how customers shop stores.
Everything that fellow Braintrust member Neil Saunders said is 100% true. I’d also add that tracking in-store inventory is great, but also knowing about inventory in other stores can be helpful when a store is out of stock. An out-of-stock item available in another store is a sale and delivery waiting to happen.
RFID+AI is like peanut butter and jelly and its going to take over the entire supply chain from the moment a product is born to when its purchased and returned and re-sold and recycled – this is knowing everything all the time without scanning anything ever again.
The use case scenarios that make RFID valuable continue to increase, while the cost of the technology continues to fall. That combination of factors means that the ability for retailers and manufacturers to finally gain the full measure of value from this technology finally appears imminent. From inventory accuracy to improved store efficiencies, and from omnichannel order fulfillment to brand insights, that ROI business case for technology has begun to arrive. What’s interesting however is that Apparel was not the category that I thought would lead the way on this topic. Surely Food & Beverage, as well as CPG, would be the categories with the earliest adoption, but that is not necessarily what our industry is seeing. However it arrives, the mainstream adoption of RFID has finally begun to arrive, and the benefit for retailers, consumer brands, and consumers appears right in front of us…finally.
RFID will likely have its mass market acceptance relatively soon – but its cost (both from a device and labor standpoint) will limit its application beyond Specialty/Apparel retail, with likely low to no grocery penetration.
Item-level RFID adoption is projected to rise in 2025, improving customer experiences, simplifying checkout, and enhancing loss prevention. Retailers can also use RFID for personalized marketing, real-time tracking, and seamless omnichannel integration, boosting efficiency and sales.
It sure took long enough…but item-level RFID is absolutely revolutionizing the way retail works.
Great point on the timing! We have been talking about RFID for more than 20 year. Back in 2003, Walmart mandated the use of RFID tags on cases and pallets from its top suppliers. With the costs of tags becoming more reasonable and the numerous benefits of item level tagging, hopefully, RFID will become more pervasive. Beyond the reduction of labor for inventory counting, accurate inventory records will help eliminate the need for safety stock for online order replenishment. Let’s go RFID!
Item-level RFID is a very meaningful improvement for PART of the retail business, not the whole thing. It’s important to keep in mind that it is far less appropriate for fast-moving consumer goods than it is for soft lines, electronics, and housewares.
The tags have become far more economical and functional, but they’re still not great on metallic items or containers filled with liquids, which can absorb and reflect the radio signals. And it seems wasteful to stick them on cereal boxes destined for landfills a week after purchase – while there are other viable options for in-store sensing and automated re-ordering.
Item-level inventory visibility is indeed bringing game-changing benefits in many departments, but in a full-spectrum supercenter or a large hardware store, RFID is only a partial solution. In a C-store or a small grocer, it may be irrelevant.
for RFID all of the main roads lead back to Inventory accuracy and the shortest time to fulfillment from time of order. Retailers will spend the next few years perfecting The benefits of inventory accuracy that RFID can bring. There will be some fringe use cases in the mean time but Inventory accuracy is the short term , and very large benefit, of RFID. Inventory accuracy leads to less labor on fulfillment, less inventory on hand, increased sales, and a long lost of other benefits. RFID will bridge the gap between low shrink and truly accurate inventory at the UPC level.
For a business that is as data hungry and data reliant as retail, it’s odd that it took as long as it did to reach this level of deployment. Was it an ROI thing, or wasn’t it a shiny enough bauble to get the attention it really deserved? I mean, how many decades old is the technology? And it’s only now becoming cost effective…???
More than twenty years ago, in 2003, I experienced Metro’s “Store of the Future,” showcasing RFID among other new technologies. What we’re realizing today is the journey from technological possibility to economic viability. Cost curves are finally reaching a critical mass, with the cost of tags and readers plummeting, accompanied by a reduction in the total cost of ownership. The COVID period transformed inventory accuracy from nice-to-have to a must-have. Retailers couldn’t afford 65% accuracy when customers expected ship-from-store fulfillment in hours, not days. After years of upstream supplier mandates from Walmart, Target, and other retailers, as well as investments from brands like Nike and Adidas, retailers (such as Academy Sports) can now inherit pre-tagged inventory rather than bearing the costs of tagging. We’ve also evolved from nightmarish custom implementations to API-based solutions that plug into existing ERP infrastructure in weeks rather than months. Lastly, RFID was always able to deliver better inventory counts, but today AI transforms that accuracy into predictive insights, personalized recommendations, promotion optimization, and automated replenishment. Today, there is exponentially more value creation and capture from that RFID data.
Transformative technologies often languish for long periods until multiple constraints are lifted, enabling rapid adoption and widespread implementation. RFID exemplifies this pattern – retailers are overcoming the operational and economic barriers that had hindered its true potential. We’ve evolved beyond simple inventory counts to understanding retail physics—the fundamental forces governing how products, people, and profits interact in physical space, moving from a better inventory paradigm to behavioral insights and predictive commerce.
I have worked with RFID in the retail environment intermittently for nearly 15 years. Continuously, it seems that RFID technology is approximately two to three years away from becoming mainstream. Numerous issues have hindered its widespread adoption, such as building layout challenges, including very thick walls in older buildings. I recall having a conversation with a colleague about 15 years ago regarding the possibility of using individual RFID codes in a grocery store environment to determine precisely where a customer picked up an item. This capability would be particularly useful for products promoted in multiple locations within the store.
Certainly, the advent of artificial intelligence offers significant potential for enhancing RFID technology by increasing the number of use cases and potentially enabling the forward deployment of inventory—from the backroom to the store floor—based on AI predictions.
However, RFID is only one aspect of the overall smart store or IoT-connected store. This technology also appears to be about two to three years away from mainstream adoption and has been for many years. The concept of having a real-time digital twin of store operations is highly appealing, as it would allow real-time merchandising decisions to improve overall business performance. Nevertheless, the costs of both hardware and software need to continue declining. There is an analogy that I heard some time ago: this type of technology is akin to a road bridge over a river—everyone wants to benefit from it, but no one wants to bear the cost themselves.
RFID is finally starting to show its real value on the store floor. What stands out is how retailers are using it not just for visibility but to support daily store operations like faster replenishment, better fulfillment, and fewer gaps between online and offline inventory.
What’s working now is the mix of better tech, lower costs, and real use cases that help store teams, not just dashboards. The next step will be using that accurate data to actually improve planning and customer experience, not just count stock better.
I’ve made so many bets on RFID finally hitting the tipping point that I’m a bit gunshy to be honest. The business benefits have never been in question. The issue has been cost, process changes, and change management. I agree that the barriers for adoption over the years have been eroding. It certainly feels like the last barrier is managing change.
I have been advocating for item-level RFID tagging for approximately ten years, When retailers piggyback all the benefits of RFID tagging, the decision should be a no-brainer:
Unit Inventory AccuracyInventory takingSales floor replenishmentSecurity/LPSelf-checkoutall leading to increased sales and customer satisfaction. The remaining hurdle is to get all manufacturers to agree to attach RFID tags to all their product, at the source of manufacture. It could not happen too soon!
It’s exciting to see RFID evolve from Walmart pilots decades ago to a retail staple that improves trading partners’ operations. More retail stakeholders will invest in RFID infrastructure to improve in-store and supply chain visibility, inventory management and the customer experience.
Item-level RFID has tremendous potential at the store level, specifically with respect to customer service and personalization. AI has the power to combine tracking, heat mapping, customer profiling, and product data to transform the customer experience in physical stores the same way the AI has transformed ECM.
RFID use has been largely binary. If detect no product A then get more product A. Or similar single trick applications.
With AI, RFID can improve decision making. The added capabilities of AI and RFID combined, properly exploited (not a small challenge in existing organizations), makes a lot of sense.
New and even existing technologies often need a partner to gain widespread adoption. RFID benefits greatly from AI.