Uniqlo has a revolutionary new system—and it’s built around old technology.
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By zacwest 2023-12-235:39 I know in France this system have been used by Decathlon (which is a really appreciated chain store of sports equipment) for multiple years.
I’m not sure if they developed it themselves (I know they do have some tech team but I don’t know if they have the capacity to develop hardware) or if it’s an off the shelf solution. It’s also possible that the needed hardware parts were already available and that they developed the software and the chassis.
And yes this tech is like magic, you just throw all your stuff in the bin and boom, you pay.
I also suspect that it only works for baskets that are not too dense (so clothes and sport equipment are ok) because otherwise we would have this in every grocery store since the gain in time is tremendous even compared to self-scan cashiers. It’s basically longer to scan your loyalty card and to contactless pay than to scan your 25 articles.
Or maybe it’s just the cost of RFID tags that prevents this to happen because at the end of the day, queues at cashier are rarely a money bottleneck.
By avianlyric 2023-12-239:485 reply Two things prevent this tech from being deployed by more stores.
1. Cost of RFID tags, they’re very cheap, but still an order of magnitude more expensive than barcodes and have a meaningful impact on item costs in some markets (notably groceries).
2. Supply chain problems. This is actually a much bigger issue than the cost. RFID based checkouts require a store of have every single one of their suppliers integrated the tags into their products. Most shops simply don’t have enough control of their supply chains to make that happen in a reasonable timeframe. Until every product on the shelves has tags, you can’t deploy new checkouts, but you still need to pay for RFID tags you can’t use during the migration.
Decathlon have RFID based checkouts because they mostly sell their own products they’ve designed and had manufactured. For the vast majority of their products the RFID tag is stitched directly into the product, so it’s not a label that can be easily peeled off, or fall off. For the small number of 3rd party products they sell, they’ve got enough volume to get other suppliers to integrate RFID tags, or they can use removable labels because the risk of lost labels is acceptable if it only applies to 1% of your stock.
So don’t expect to see this type of tech deployed elsewhere anytime soon. Decathlon’s extremely strong vertical integration makes it substantially cheaper and easier for them to deploy RFID, compared to most other ships.
> RFID based checkouts require a store of have every single one of their suppliers integrated the tags into their product.
I'm sure the same was said about the introduction of barcodes in the 1970's. How can every single manufacturer be expected to adopt a uniformed standard, where there are not clashes between standards and adoption? Well, they managed it by collaboration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GS1
The same was also said about chip-and-pin payments, and further with online payments. This was largely implemented through regulation by the EU.
By avianlyric 2023-12-2311:551 reply Barcodes are much cheaper to implement, and provided a much greater benefit compared to the alternative (no automatic way of recognising goods), compared to RFID. RFID improves the customer UX experience at self checkouts, and also the opportunity to improve stock management (stock counts could be reduced to just waving an antenna over a shelf). But that improve is pretty marginal compared to barcodes. Also RFID tags aren’t a simple to introduce as barcodes, you can just slap an RFID tag on existing packing and just expect it to work, there are issues when dealing products that contain metal etc. Not insurmountable, but one more fly in the ointment.
Chip-and-pin is very poor comparison, there’s realistically only 3 major card networks in Europe. If they mandate Chip-and-PIN, then chip-and-PIN happens. They only need to update card readers, of which there is only a small number of manufacturers, and they all already are used to following strict standards, and cards can be replaced as they expire, and again only a small number of manufacturers.
Simply put RFID requires a huge number of manufacturers to correctly implement RFID tags on all their products, just so a single store can implement better checkouts. Why would manufacturers voluntarily pay for that cost when there’s no clear benefit for them? For stores, why would want to cover the cost of their suppliers adding RFID infrastructure to their supply chain, when the benefits are fairly limited compared to barcodes?
That’s completely to Chip-and-PIN, where only the stores need to update their readers, and they can easily change to which ever manufacturer is willing to make them.
Companies like Decathlon and Uniqlo have a huge advantage, because they get huge supply and stock control benefits from RFID due to their vertical integration. Better self checkout are just the cherry on top, but won’t be the primary reason for adopting RFID tech.
It is more than just improving the customer UX, it creates massive savings for the retailers. The further reduction of manned checkouts, and the faster customer throughput (some data that it is 25x faster) meaning reduced queues, which increases volume of sales. Every bit of reduced friction for the customer, increases profit potential.
Further, loss prevention is reduced as accidental scanning errors, and ease of intentional theft is reduced. The issue you raise of containing metal is a historic problem, but has been solved for many years through RAIN RFID tags, where a metal surface itself actually becomes part of the antenna, making it even stronger. Are you aware of any further current issues?
I agree, the cost is higher than a barcode, but when the barcode was introduced the same argument was valid. What is the benefit to the manufacturer to get involved in stock management, when the shop was previously responsible for "pricing-up" the item themselves. Wrigley's gum was the first to do it, but how did it benefit them?
With more adoption, the price will decrease, and this will become standard. Or, what is the alternative? That we use barcodes for the next 100 years?
Regarding chip-and-pin, I was responsible for writing some of the middleware in ~2004 that interfaced between chip-and-pin machines and terminals (& other devices), for what was then the largest provider in this space. It's wild that you state it was as simple as you claim, it was a massive effort across the industry, requiring lots of revisions to standards, collaboration, conferences etc. You feeling it was just a case of swapping the machine over, my former colleagues and I should take as a complement that we did it so well to give that impression.
Something that occurs to me might be a problem in grocery stores is vegetables sold by weight. I can purchase potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, and other vegetables by weight and the scale will print a barcode to be scanned. Can one just print off an RFID tag like that? Seems unlikely.
By Daviey 2023-12-2314:37 My prediction is that the ability to choose-your-own will go away over the next 10 years, and it will only be the option to buy pre-packaged. For the retail outlet, weigh-your-own is slow to process and a lot of wastage.
Which is a shame, because it is better for the consumer and nearly always cheaper for us to choose-our-own.
By avianlyric 2023-12-2314:47 > The issue you raise of containing metal is a historic problem, but has been solved for many years through RAIN RFID tags
Yes I know it’s solved. But it’s not as simple as barcodes. Each product needs to be evaluated to decide if you’re gonna put a tag on it that works well on metal surfaces, because those tags tend to be marginally more expensive than the alternatives.
> I agree, the cost is higher than a barcode, but when the barcode was introduced the same argument was valid. What is the benefit to the manufacturer to get involved in stock management, when the shop was previously responsible for "pricing-up" the item themselves.
Simple, there’s an obvious cost reduction for shops, no more need for labels or hours of pricing up, makes it easier for a store to eat the costs for their manufacturers. For manufacturers, the improved stock management at stores would allow this store to carry a large variety of brands, which makes it easier for manufacturers to get their products onto shelves.
> With more adoption, the price will decrease, and this will become standard. Or, what is the alternative? That we use barcodes for the next 100 years?
The price of RFID tags isn’t expected to get any lower. General consensus is that there’s already enough demand for RFID tags that they’ve more or less hit their lower possible price, and any further reduction are not going to be meaningful.
What’s wrong with using barcodes? It’s a well proven technology, you could update them to 2D barcodes if you want more encoded data. There’s no reason to get rid of technology that works perfectly well just for the sake of using a “newer” technology. Most retailers are looking at Amazon fresh stores and wondering if that can be made to scale to grocery stores.
> Further, loss prevention is reduced as accidental scanning errors, and ease of intentional theft is reduced.
The types of thefts you’re referring to aren’t meaningful compared to theft carried out by organised crime, and by the staff themselves. RFID tags aren’t going to stop people walking into stores and simply picking up and entire rack of clothes, or sweeping all stakes in the meat section, and walking out. That kind of theft is a real problem, and store staff deliberately don’t stop those thieves because the risk of violence is far too high.
> Regarding chip-and-pin, I was responsible for writing some of the middleware in ~2004 that interfaced between chip-and-pin machines and terminals (& other devices), for what was then the largest provider in this space.
I’m very aware of the complexities involved in any kind of change to the EMV standards, or simple changes in payment network rules. I’ve been involved in both the negotiations and technical implementation of those changes. The difference is the number of parties and teams involved. A single grocer will have hundreds of suppliers each, and likely thousands of manufacturers. The number of parties involved is substantially greater than the number of issuers and acquirers in the world. So yes, I do think stuff like Chip-and-PIN was simpler to implement than RFID. It’s all relative.
By kotaKat 2023-12-2315:03 Walmart tried to use EPC tags (UHF long-range tags) a long while ago on apparel. It died out, but EPC is 100% back.
Target and Walmart both use EPC tags now as part of the inventory journey and it wouldn't surprise me to see more and more integration down the line. Look for the GS1 EPC logo on stickers on things at Walmart...
https://www.gs1jp.org/form/standard/epc/logo/EPC-Tag-Notific...
Target also leverages Zebra's Transition Point Readers as well near entrances and backrooms to track movement of items. https://www.zebra.com/us/en/products/rfid/rfid-readers/st500...
By bradknowles 2023-12-243:28 You also have to be sure that the RFID tags can't be easily removed from the items. Otherwise, people would just remove the RFID tags, stuff the items in the bin, get told that they don't owe anything, and walk out scot free.
But how do you do that with blueberries. Does each blueberry have to have its own unique non-removable RFID tag?
There's all sorts of items at a grocery store where it's hard to guarantee the tags can't get removed from the items. That's part of why Amazon doesn't use RFID tags in their "just walk out" stores.
By ipqk 2023-12-2313:39 Also anti-theft devices. I just saw a tiktok where Zara had a similar RFID self-checkout system, but the customer had to remove the anti-theft dongles themselves. It makes for a hugely different customer experience.
By amadeuspagel 2023-12-2311:071 reply How would a grocery store look that's designed around that? Sell only essential goods where you can control the supply chain, and sell it only in big portions so that the cost of the RFID tag doesn't matter.
By avianlyric 2023-12-2312:041 reply Shops like Aldi are good place to look. They still use barcodes, but they’ve got their manufacturers to print the barcodes multiple times on packaging, and print them huge[1]. This is done to speed up scanning at their checkouts, so cashiers don’t need to look for the barcode, they just grab the item in any orientation and yank it across the scanner. That in turn means they get higher throughput per cashier, which means fewer cashiers and tills.
[1] https://i1.wp.com/www.savingthecrumbs.com/wp-content/uploads...
They also tell the cashiers that their family will be killed if they don't process each item at at least Mach 1. (Or that's what it feels like at the checkout anyway...)
By mdekkers 2023-12-246:53 Aldi is German, and “grocery packing” is the unsung national sport, everybody is at it, all the time.
You have not know humiliation if you have not experienced a line of slightly elderly shoppers mildly frowning and tutting as you hurl your items into a bag, whilst the cashier looks at you with overt disapproval. The only accepted bagging speed is “Superhuman” and the best day of my life was when the cashier at my regular Edeka nodded approvingly at the fact that I was practically ripping the groceries out of their hand as soon as the cash register beeped.
Supermarket staff here in Italy, where I now reside, think I am insane, and I work hard to contain my impatience with those lesser-trained people in front of me at the cash register.
By avianlyric 2023-12-2314:511 reply Cashiers are measured on their scan speed, and get bonus based on performance. So yeah, they’re highly incentivised to scan as fast as they physically can.
By viraptor 2023-12-241:17 It goes too far though. They're throttled by how fast the customer can bag things, so going way faster and overloading the packing area is counterproductive. (+ the experience makes me that much less likely to choose that shop again in the future)
It's the cost of RFID tags that makes this not viable for grocery. Grocery has much lower value per item so the cost for each tag is prohibitive. Last time I ran that math it would wipe out the entire margin of the business. Grocery retail operates by huge volume over very small per-item margins.
By wenc 2023-12-2317:03 Grocery also has a much larger set of SKUs and lots of low-margin items.
RFID makes sense for mid to higher value items that have limited SKUs.
By bohinjc 2023-12-2816:37 I might be able to share some insights on this one : I worked on the uses-cases, tech design and first deployments of RFID at decathlon, back in… 2008-2009 I guess.
We faced major issues back then, but the most important one was the cost of tagging every single product ; both cost of the tag and cost of attaching it (comparatively, antennas and IT where marginal costs at scale). Back in the end of the 2000s, tags were more expensive than today. Decathlon had one major advantage though : it manufactures most of the product. That means we could add the tag in the label at the factory. But still, to make it economically viable, we had to pile-up multiple uses cases. Every single one was important in the balance to justify buying so many tags and tagging so many products. So we went very creative, designing new ways to reduce costs in the whole manufacturing/logistics/storage/retail/after-life chain. Because no single advantage was enough by itself. We also had to imagine these new enablers and uses-cases with the state of this new technology (especially at the time) : airwaves are difficult to predict, and not 100% perfect in terms of detection, collision, …
We invented new ways to do things that were mostly already done, but cheaper (in man-hours for repetitive tasks mostly), better (quality and fiability of results), and/or more frequently. Thing logistics optimization (wrong door / parcel detected earlier), whole lifecycle and whereabouts tracking (for defective product callbacks for example), daily inventory (we had the idea to use cleaning carts with antenas to have a daily store inventory), NOSBOS (« not on shelves but on stock », detecting prodcts that where in inventory but not available at this specific moment in the department/shelf), warranty tracking, …
At the end of the story, self-checkout is mostly a by-product, not a target for the deployment. It’s something that was made possible but not a first target.
> I know in France this system have been used by Decathlon
Also in Germany. It confused me the first time I saw it because it looks so different, but it worked well.
By interestica 2023-12-273:26 Also in Canada. The process feels a bit strange - especially when the receipt is just sent electronically as well.
By technotarek 2023-12-239:531 reply Also in use at (at least some of) Paris’ libraries. I was quite impressed with the frictionless book borrowing experience. Scan your card and put your mess of a pile of kids books on the platform. Done. Happy kid.
To boot, I was worried I was taking too many books. Expected a limit of 5 or maybe 10. But when I asked —- 40!
By cameronh90 2023-12-2319:12 I first saw this system at a Texas Instruments demo in the UK in 2007-ish. They also demoed walking through a RFID reading gate with a trolley full of tagged goods.
I thought it was very cool at the time but I assumed it must have been too impractical for some reason until Decathlon rolled it out in 2019.
By ozyschmozy 2023-12-239:051 reply In Netherlands as well. It actually picked up 3 of my items when I approached before I put anything in the basket. I was pretty confused at first
This happened to me too. It threw me because they told me which machine to go to (#11 for example) and when I arrived my items were already listed.
For a moment I thought they had futuristic CV covering the whole store.
By mint2 2023-12-245:53 These descriptions are making Amazon’s route to simplified checkout look over complicated and not even close to the best route to tackle the problem.
By uxp8u61q 2023-12-2311:07 For people listing other places where Decathlon has this - perhaps France is more relevant since Decathlon is a French company.
By tropxy 2023-12-239:25 Also in Portugal. The system works pretty well and has been around for like 2y or more now
Went to Europe a few months ago and experienced this checkout method in Uniqlo and Zara. It was mind blowing at first and I was trying to figure out wtf was going on. Was it AI?, maybe some complex algorithm based on item weight and other variables?
Turns out they were “simply” RFID chips. It’s amazing how magical technology can be. I hope the tech spreads because I hate the checkout experience.
So there are disposable RFID chips on every price tag? I would think that is wasteful and expensive? Is there a way to recapture them like a deposit return
By Timshel 2023-12-239:18 Would be nice for it to be recycled but at the day the true waste is probably the product you buy.
At least Uniqlo or Decathlon are producing goods of relative quality.
By avianlyric 2023-12-239:51 The tags are usually stitched directly into the clothes. Realistically they’re never going to be recaptured and returned. They’ll be recycled/disposed of, when the garment itself reaches EOL.
By Hamuko 2023-12-238:22 I think they're even on the price tags of items you buy online. I've noticed that my Uniqlo online orders also have some kind of circuitry inside them.
By jhanschoo 2023-12-2314:33 I've seen bookstores implement disposable RFID for loss prevention more than a decade ago where the books sell for around as much as these garments. I suppose the marginal cost of RFIDs that support this system is small if you already intend to use disposable RFIDs for loss prevention, with a large limiting factor being the acceptance of self-checkout.
By slim 2023-12-2317:12 some clothes come with the tag sewed in from the factory (not talking about uniqlo). which is worrisome because the combination of rfid tags you wear could be used to track you
By underseacables 2023-12-235:592 reply That's a lot of copper over time..
> That's a lot of copper over time..
FWIW, RFID tags often use aluminum.
According to a relevant study ([1]), "Environmental Burden Case Study of RFID Technology in Logistics Centre", the mean weight of the metal with foil is 0.161 g per tag (see Table 2).
Let's suppose that every person on Earth (~8B) buys 1000 RFID-encoded goods per year: 0.161 * 8B * 1000 = 1.3e12 g = 1.3e9 kg = 1.3 M tonnes. In 2022, some 20M tonnes of copper has been mined ([2]), which gives us ~5% of the total copper produced. If aluminum is used, then ~2%.
Takeaways:
- yes, it could be a lot of metal, if the RFID technology gets widespread (narrator voice: it will)
- it will visibly increase demand for aluminum / copper, but it won't be the end of the world.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9921012/
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/mining/comments/18o9ydj/all_the_met...
By cyberax 2023-12-237:02 > narrator voice: it will
People really tried to make RFIDs work, but it's a poor fit for anything with metal in it (cans of beans, electronics, etc.). Sun and IBM tried to push them in 2000-s (remember that ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Fdox5_rg4 ), and it never worked in real life.
Uniqlo checkouts work because they are selling mostly, well, clothes that you can just put inside the scanner.
By wraptile 2023-12-2310:11 I think key here is that it's 100% recyclable or even reusable. The used tags could even be picked up at the exit/checkout if I understand correctly the process correctly.
By hiddencost 2023-12-236:351 reply Paying someone to spend their life checking people out: much more expensive and wasteful.
By jpcfl 2023-12-237:55 Yeah, and Uniqlo will hopefully find a way to recycle these tags once there's a business case for it.
You can't recycle man-hours.
By jiveturkey 2023-12-236:023 reply They aren't chips, they are printed tags. They cost about 0.10 ea.
https://www.rfidjournal.com/faq/how-much-does-an-rfid-tag-co...
Sadly the article is undated, so we have no clue when "today" is. But the price feels about right.
To someone as large as Uniqlo, I imagine the cost is closer to 0.01.
The ability to read multiple tags like this has existed for at least a decade. I wonder why retail like target doesn't have it.
EDIT: technically they are chips, but we call this kind of passive barcode-equivalent kind of thing a tag.
By TulliusCicero 2023-12-236:121 reply Target would have to require it of all their suppliers.
Uniqlo only sells their own stuff, so it's easier to adopt.
The retailer can add RFID labels. They do this in decathlon (sporting goods store in Europe) where they have used same checkout process for a few years
By resolutebat 2023-12-239:293 reply Decathlon also sells only own-brand goods.
By supermatt 2023-12-2310:10 No they dont. They sell many 3rd party brands in store in nearly every category. I believe they were (mostly) own-brand up until a few years ago, but thats certainly not the case now.
By andrewshadura 2023-12-2312:57 They also sell other brands. Bicycle parts are often third-party. For example, some bike locks are made by Axa.
By mertbio 2023-12-239:44 This is not true. You can also buy known brands like Adidas and so on, at least in Germany.
They are chips. Press release suggests they're using Impinj's ISO-18000-63 chips. Those chips are small (datasheet says 362×247×120 microns) and directly bonded to the printed antenna inlay.
By jiveturkey 2023-12-237:33 They all have a chip. The kind used here are commonly called tags.
https://www.huayuansh.com/uniqlo-global-stores-applied-rfid-...
By BHSPitMonkey 2023-12-236:25 TFA states "roughly 4 cents, give or take a penny"
