Basket-at-once scanning technology exists, but retailers aren't biting

At this year's NRF show, the company 5stat demonstrated an RFID-based application for apparel retailers which scanned an entire counter full of clothing into the POS instantaneously, eliminating the need to drag each item across a barcode scanner. Microsoft has a similar demo unit in its Retail Experience Center that rings up copies of Windows Vista and Halo Wars in a blink; IBM has two such fully functional test labs for retailers, one in southern France, the other in New York.

It is incontrovertible that from a technology standpoint, basket-at-once scanning is available today. But the business case isn't there yet, and the sad irony is that the retail segment that stands to benefit from it the most — supermarkets and grocery — will likely be the last to see it, if it does at all, thanks to some unique challenges.

"I've seen the demos, but to my knowledge, there is no retailer that has item-level RFID tagging on all live SKUs, which would be a prerequisite for a shopping cart scan-at-once," said Jason Goldberg, vice president of marketing at retail design firm MTI.

Getting RFID tags into the supply chain

The stumbling block is not a technology one, and it is no longer really a cost one — tag prices are hovering close to the $.05 to $.08 range that most pundits said would be the "magic number" for mass adoption. The big problem, it seems, is finding a logical and cost-effective way to get the tags onto the products themselves.

The perfect scenario involves retailers getting their suppliers to put tags on the products before shipping them to the stores.

"If you have a retailer that is selling 50 different brands of apparel, the challenge is, they have to work with all 50 suppliers to tag their products," said Himanshu Bhatt, global solutions executive and program director for IBM sensors and actuators. "But if you have a branded apparel retailer, the ones that have their own manufacturing, they have their own captive supply chain" and can integrate tagging as the last step in the manufacturing process.

Of course, those retailers with 50 brands can always slap the tags on the shirts themselves, but in doing so miss out on many of the supply chain benefits that item-level tagging provides above and beyond basket-at-once scanning, making it less of a value proposition.

Goldberg said few retailers have even come close to tagging enough of their products to make basket-at-once scanning a possibility.

"In my estimation, it will be some time before we see it," he said. "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."

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Whither the RFID-enabled shopping cart?

So what about supermarkets, the segment that would benefit the most from basket-at-once scanning? They are likely to be the last in line to get basket-at-once scanning, if indeed they get it at all.

Consider the apparel retailer from earlier with 50 different brands. Multiply their tagging woes by a few thousand to get a grasp on what a challenge item-level tagging and RFID checkout represents to supermarkets. It's a swirl of problems that is equal parts economic and practical.

"Anything that it doesn't read, I get to keep, right?" asked RFID and mobile technology consultant Rod Saunders. "The only way around this is to do a piece count and compare or do a weight match. Getting employees that can reliably count is harder than getting them to scan." He noted that the exceptions process could be a staggeringly bad customer experience — if you think an unrecognized item during a self-checkout transaction is a pain, just imagine one at the bottom of a full shopping cart.

Tom Napier, who developed a successful RFID application to handle the check-in and check-out of documents for a Canadian government agency, said grocery basket-at-once presents unique problems due to the technological limitations of RFID, combined with the close-quarters nature of products tossed into a shopping cart.

"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," he said. 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."