WINCOR WORLD: How long before RFID check-out? | News | Self-Service & Kiosk Association

PADERBORN, Germany — It’s one of the Holy Grails of retail: A shopper fills her cart with groceries, sidles up to a check-out counter, and virtually instantly, without a single item being taken out back out of the cart, the items are itemized and totaled.

RFID technology is currently the best technological bet to make that happen. But exactly when is a matter of no small contention.

Even on the floor of Wincor World, the annual trade fair sponsored by Wincor Nixdorf, there is gaping chasm between the optimism of some, who put the advent at about 10 years, and the belief of at least one Wincor executive, who in essence says not in our lifetime.

Score one for the optimists. Maybe. Wincor Nixdorf in partnership with IT component manufacturer Wanzel has developed a prototype grocery cart called the RFID-Tango.

According to spokesman Rainer Eckert, the cart and its software platform clear at least one of the major barriers.

The problem solved by the RFID-Tango is called bulk-reading. RFID chips broadcast their signal a thousand times a second. One reader attempting to comprehend can get confused trying to separate the various voices. Imagine trying to listen to a dozen voices at once. The bulk-reading solution developed by Wanzel manages to tell voices to “shut up” when it has finished reading them—up to a 100 items in one cart—and reexamines the set of signals constantly to listen for additional items or to detect whether any items have been removed from the cart.

Eckert admits the remaining challenges are not insignificant.

First, as has been discussed ad nauseum in stories about RFID adoption, the price of RFID transmitters must come down. Currently, chips are under four cents each, with a 24-bit chip. The goal is to get them under two cents, which would make the technology less costly than barcode printing, which costs about two cents per package, owing to the exacting standards of bar width and readability. In addition, current transmitters are metal-based, which limits the recyclability of the package. The goal is to make them polymer-based. Then, not only will the transmitters be recyclable, they can be imprinted onto the package as part of the offset printing process.

Second, retailers and RFID component manufacturers must agree on standards such as naming conventions and broadcast guidelines, as well as develop and roll-out a mammoth data transmission and storage infrastructure.

In about a decade, Eckert believes those problems will be solved, similar to the solutions that evolved to implement barcode scanning. But whether it 10 years or 15 or five, he’s confident it will be in this century.