You drop your clothes into a big bin (I’ve always done it one piece at a time, didn’t think to do all at once) and it adds up all your items. I’ve used this maybe 8 times, 100% accurate so far.
Not sure how it works but I guessed RFID and quick Google appears to confirm:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big...
Disclaimer: I work on a RFID reader manufacturing company
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350413738_A_Model_o...
And things like onions have a loose outer skin, which falls off. And grocery store clerks peel the outside (wilting) leaves off of things like local lettuce daily.
Seems like rfid on groceries would be hard for fresh produce, and we don't need everything wrapped in plastic.
Sure an apple or a squash is hard to track, but a large (probably a majority) of a modern grocery stores selection is prepackaged goods.
It it is a lot easier to run a veggienet or whatever on a small subset of the goods purchased.
Materials alone provide a huge challenge.
EAS is a purely psychological deterrent, for liability reasons stores can't really do much when it goes off. As more and more shrink is the result of ORC, RFID will have a place but money is better spent on alternative technologies like facial recognition and ALPR.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111
Unlikely to work for groceries given the costs of RFID tags, I imagine.
But if we really could scale RFID tag production down to 1 cent each, then we’d likely just throw them out. Not that I’m a fan of throwing away silicon…
Still more than printed paper but the cost is not astronomical. Some sellers on Alibaba even advertise 3c cad
If the store decides to eat the cost of those? Sure, I can buy that logic.
However, I don't see stores being unable to just raise the price of items by 10c without much pushback, which would eliminate that issue with the profit margin entirely (since the cost of it is offloaded to the customer).
I, personally, would love to be able to pay just 10c extra per item, if it meant that I can have a checkout experience similar to that of Uniqlo.
At even 10c a tag , it is equivalent to one person scanning 200 items a hour (assuming $20/hour wages) .
Factoring in time to bag and do a cash/card/coupon transaction etc a retail employee is not doing more than 500 or maybe 1000 items a hour .
A cost of 2c is definitely close to economic feasibility if 10c is not
I am not saying RFID will eliminate employees in retail , just that there is cost to not having RFID too, we should only see the diff as the cost of the tech not absolute numbers
Why is that relevant?
If 5 employees spend 20% of their combined time on checkout, and you get rid of checkout, you can go down to 4 employees, can't you? Why does the exact distribution matter? You'll still have a healthy variety of tasks to spread among those employees.
I can’t imagine there’s that much untapped profit in the grocery business that Amazon could turn a profit with such an expensive and unreliable mess like Just Walk Out and I find it’s so typical Amazon to find out that the man behind the curtain is actually a bunch of offshore workers in India.
You need to basically have custom packaging so the tags are not easily swappable and the RFID tag is not free too, it could really add up for small price items.
The maybe e-waste problem? I'm not really familiar with how much of a problem this really is but on a grocery store size it could add up
The closest thing I've seen in a convenience store, was a fully automated 7-Eleven that I ran across in Taipei last year. It seems to rely on smart shelves[1], rather than just product video recognition. This could work for most types of groceries.
[1] https://www.retail-insight-network.com/news/7-eleven-itri-st...
It's borderline ancient tech. So why is it not applied everywhere? Because stores would rather have you line up and buy stuff from the "impulse aisle" and tip or donate at their PoS (higher rates with an employee glaring at your selection)
RFID tags are expensive compared to printing barcodes. The volume of products moved in a grocery store is far larger than that of a clothing store like Uniqlo.
Saw this in the Honolulu location and was similarly impressed. It's got to be pretty close to a theoretical minimum in check out speed, while requiring no labor and no accounts.