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Comment by awelxtr | Hacker News Reader

Self checkout systems based on RFID are very convenient, quick and quite accurate compared to self checkout on grocery stores'l. The main problem on groceries is that the tags are expensive compared to the product (tags prices are in the order of tens of cents depending on manufacturer and size)

Disclaimer: I work on a RFID reader manufacturing company

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Any ideas whats stopping it from becoming much cheaper? RFIDs on everything seem like a good move in the robotics age.

Seems like a lot of ewaste to me for marginal convenience otoh

Agreed. It would be cool if you could recycle them then and there for re-use.

There has been at least one study on just this question

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350413738_A_Model_o...

I don't want rfid tags in my apples, and putting them on the outside of each one seems costly.

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.

This is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

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.

Some would argue that trying to eliminate self or manual checkouts from groceries stores is letting the perfect be the enemy of good.

You won't have it anyway. An rfid tag tag placed on any conductor (apples are conductors because of their water content) 'detunes' the tag and makes it impossible to read

It’s not very expensive to being with, but it’s magnitudes more expensive than a print tag. Print is either free (a package being printed anyways) or extremely cheap (sticker).

Materials alone provide a huge challenge.

I forgot to add that rfid tags placed on conductors are hard to read so food is a specially hard product to work with

It is almost here. Computer vision combined with some secret sauce that is cheaper than RFID that Walmart is asking supplier to implement.

https://kioskindustry.org/walmart-self-checkout/

This doen't solve real time inventory. RFID does, also neither helps with EAS which RFID does'

EAS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_article_surveillanc...

Some of my super smart colleagues solved real time inventory with big data within a small enough margin of error that Walmart scrapped the shelf scanning robots that were being deployed.

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.

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