Enabling RFID Retail: A European Perspective

The past two years have witnessed an explosion of interest in RFID and supporting technologies primarily due to their rapidly expanding use to track products through the grocery supply chain. Such applications monitor Store-Keeping Units (SKU) rather than individual product items, since item-level tagging is not yet practical due to the relatively high cost of RFID deployment and the very low profit margin of supermarket products. Yet, putting economic and other technical concerns aside, one can easily envision a situation where each item in a supermarket is tagged with an RFID label, shopping carts feature RFID readers and potentially on board computers that recognise products put in the cart, and display information and promotions retrieved wirelessly from the system back-end.