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Comment by garyclarke27 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised RFID hasn't taken over. Scanning the whole basket in one go is way more convenient and faster than fiddly labour intensive Barcode scanning of individual items. RFID is now very cheap and the benefits of saved: labour, time, theft prevention etc are huge. Decathlon is the only retailer I have seen use this.

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Uniqlo is using RFID too at least in France. Both work pretty well and the speed of checkout is unmatched. But this works for Uniqlo and Decathlon because they only sell their own products. Supermarkets come with more hurdles, as products don't typically have any tag attached and are also selling bulk.

I also suspect you need an average price per product that's too high for supermarkets to make it worth it.

RFID doesn't work that well when more than a handful tags are present at the same time. Even at Decathlon it doesn't always work perfectly.

As I said in another comment, I think it works for Decathlon because you usually only buy a few items, but it probably wouldn't work for a supermarket where people have a dozen identical things in their cart, and often 50 or 100 total items.

Supermarkets typically only have a gross profit of a few cents per item. Even ignoring the logistical complexities of getting those tags onto the product, it's a complete non-starter simply because of the cost of the tags.

My guess is the price of a RFID tag on every single product is still uneconomical. Decathlon can do it for clothes and sports equipment, but are you really going to stick a tag on every £0.27 can of baked beans?

In NL, for a long time, you get some money back when you return glass bottles and large plastic ones to the store. A few years ago they added small plastic bottles and after that all drinks in aluminum cans. The goal is to add more packaging. (Disposable plates, cups, forks, spoons and knifes are now banned.)

Checking out is much less dirty than checking the packaging back in.

It isn't unthinkable for all products/packaging to get an RFID tag. On that scale they will be cheaper and perhaps some can be reused. Passive tags cost only 8 cent atm.

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