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Comment by sireat | Hacker News Reader

Decathlon is pretty neat and technologically advanced actually, so not surprising news for them to adopt Wero.

In eastern European stores they use RFID for every product, so you just throw stuff in a bin without scanning and can self check faster than usual self scan.

Well I have not tried throwing in a bike in a bin or a dumbbell, but I presume it works for 99% of stuff.

Curious what they pay for RFID, last I checked it is about 5-6 cents per item for small quantities.

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Not just Eastern European stores, they do it in France (it's a a French company) and India too. First time I saw it was in India, it was very impressive.

They also have a lot of vertical integration, they manufacture many of the products they sell.

Is there somewhere they don't do this?

Can confirm they do this in Canada too. Though I'm not sure they have much of a presence outside of Quebec.

It was very cool to try, and very much a "why doesn't everyone do this?" feature. I've never seen it anywhere else.

> they manufacture many of the products they sell

If you're familiar with labor disputes around Decathlon, i think a more fair representation is they get other people to manufacture it for them, in what some NGOs call human trafficking / modern slavery.

I thought it was image recognition but RFID makes more sense. However just last week I accidentally 'hacked' it by having two small identical products thrown in the bin and their cardboard boxes fell right next to each other, so the system saw only one. I had to manually move them apart to have both appear on the bill (that is why I suspected image recognition, RFID should be two separate IDs no?)

In eastern European stores they use RFID for every product, so you just throw stuff in a bin without scanning and can self check faster than usual self scan.

Yep, same here in West Europe.

Well I have not tried throwing in a bike

Haha, that would make a great Youtube skit.

It's a great store. It's similar to Ikea in that you can go in without doing any research or shopping around and be reasonably sure that whatever you buy from one of their own brands, at any price point, is better quality than the same price point somewhere else. For camping stuff especially, the value is very good. The higher end might be missing but that's almost a feature for the average person to go in and choose from a good or pretty good option.

I've seen that in Germany as well. I was surprised that automatically recognized everything after throwing it in the bin. I knew such systems existed, I didn't think we had any in actual production use here. They seem to trust the system well enough, it didn't even explicitly ask me to confirm if everything was recognized.

If you have a bike or something, staff will scan its barcode for you. They generally see you coming and you don't have to wait.

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