Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinng | Hacker News Reader

If we had a better Blue Bin system it might work. Remove tags at home and place in compartment of Blue Bin, and at the recycling centre they get sorted out and sent back to the retailers.

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…

View on HN

I mean, they cost 5-10c

Still more than printed paper but the cost is not astronomical. Some sellers on Alibaba even advertise 3c cad

Orders of magnitude more than existing barcodes which are practically free due to being printed on the packaging. A 10c RFID tag would be 10% of the cost of many products, which im sure is unacceptable to grocery stores which I can't imagine have great margins.

The wages of the scanning staff is a cost to be considered on the side .

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

Retail employees do more than checkout. You’ll still need them to stock, do customer support, clean, and more.

I obviously didn’t mean all employees ,only the employees who are doing the check out .

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

I understand, and what I am saying is that it is rare to have retail employees that _only_ do checkout. Nearly everyone performs multiple roles. Eliminating checkout will reduce the overall workload, but won't necessarily reduce headcount, or enough headcount to offset the cost of RFID tags.

> it is rare to have retail employees that _only_ do checkout

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.

> A 10c RFID tag would be 10% of the cost of many products, which im sure is unacceptable to grocery stores which I can't imagine have great margins.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com