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Comment by hollow-moe | Hacker News Reader

What a bad piece. Optical is obsolete. Decathlon (here in France at least) has RFID on all their products, they're used as anti-theft, automatic tilling: you just put them in a box at the register and it knows what it is (also kills the chips once paid) and very likely they're used all along the logistic chain.

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Putting a chip on everything sounds wasteful and worse for the environment than a printed piece of paper. Not the right direction to go in.

The chips are sub-cents per unit in terms of cost and weigh milligrams. RFID chips come in many flavours the ones most used are passive, i.e. basically just a bunch of wires printed on a tiny piece of carrier material. The label on a shirt contains more resources by weight.

Really only wires, or is there still a (tiny) chip on there somewhere?

While it can indeed be helpful as an indication, cost often doesn't factor in externalities such as pollution during production, and recycling after use. Paper has much fewer problems in those areas.

It's ok, these will go right next to the trillions of cigarette buds thrown in nature each year and probably the trillion of trillion microplastics and nanoplastics shed each year.

Nothing to see here and there can't be any possible negative consequences when people are making so much money.

100% agreed, but if you truly want to go down that route, you'll quickly find that basically NOTHING has externalities priced in. If you truly were to do that (which I'm personally not opposed to), prices of pretty much all goods and services would need to be adjusted.

Decathlon does it in every country, not just France. Same with Uniqlo and a few others, but it's still only very large chains that can afford it

Uniqlo does it in the states now. It’s the first time I encountered it though (well, except for Uniqlo in Japan, even Muji is still using bar codes).

And what is average price of one product in Decathlon compared to Lidl? Apples and oranges. How do you put RFID on fruit, vegetables and pastry btw. or you propose wrapping everything in unnecessary packaging?

So, depending on the place you don't weigh your vegetables in the aisles anymore, you know: low trust society and such. Either the cashier does it or yourself under the eye of the automated register CCTV. For places that still does they can just migrate to do it at the register and save the price of the barcode stickers and the printer. Pastries are either in boxes already barcoded so just stick an RFID instead or counted at the register by the cashier or yourself too. And nowadays RFID stickers cost nothing at that scale.

we were talking about Decathlon, where you put RFID tagged things in self service basket where they are automatically recognized, you can't do this without weighing every fruit/veg/pastry item by yourself unless someone weighed it already and put it in some unnecessary package

there are pretty much zero packaged pastries (or at least very big majority) over here in many European countries

I can't imagine how it one hotdog bun worth like 0.1EUR will cover RFID expenses if you wanna use RFID self-service baskets as Decathlon uses

Too pricey for food, it’s cheaper to print.

Printed Chipless RFID Will solve that problem if the tech really works.

How could that possibly work without a semiconductor?

Passive ones can be less than a cent per unit.

Ink is cheaper.

Not if you include the cost of the employee scanning the bar codes.

Even if the customers does it, it still takes a lot more time and space than scanning a basket full of RFIDs labels. It literally takes seconds.

I've worked in wholesale logistics (backend for inventory management) for many years way back when and let me tell you, cost of ink vs cost of a chip the least of the problems. Barcodes (and QR codes as used here) have two major flaws: reading them is challenging (works fine if the package is undamaged and you TRUST that it contains what it says on the box) and they're still just a number. RFID can help with both these issues and the savings from that can outweigh the additional cost by a lot.

Utility is key and RFID has a lot of advantages over bar codes (and QR codes).

Can any regular smartphone scan those RFID tags? If not, then the QR codes are superior because they can be scanned, making it trivial to use them for product recalls.

Merchandise point-of-sales tags isn't the only use of barcode or QR codes. Hospitals aren't going to start putting RFID for all equipment, files, and patients.

I thought that was exactly one of things RFID was used for?

Perhaps not for files, but definitely for equipment.

Wouldn't an MRI fry an RFID chip? Seems like a big issue for anything in a hospital.

It's more for portable equipment I believe, things like heart rate monitors and those things that control IV drip systems, and probably the beds/gurneys themselves as well.

I suspect it's less relevant for things that can't be moved. (Or are extremely heavy/difficult to move).

I am quite sure they still use optical on the German shops.

Nope, at least the Berlin shop is on RFID on all products.

Yeah, unless they changed on NRW shop on my area since August.

My diving mask and backpack certainly went through optical.

Not in Berlin, not in Hamburg

I guess NRW is exceptional, or had broken devices in August.

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