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RFID technology is going to give retailers a staggering amount of real-time knowledge about their stores. How will store design adapt to this revolution?
By Tom Zeit
A shopper walks into a store and a traffic monitoring system notes her presence and plots her journey. She picks up an item from a shelf and a marketing video about the item begins instantaneously on a nearby display.
She puts the item down somewhere on the other side of the store, but the staff is able to locate it right away and return it to its original shelf position. She takes several garments into a dressing room and they’re automatically identified (preventing possible theft). The dressing room mirror identifies her item and displays images of other apparel she might be interested in – and precisely where in the store to find them.
She makes her purchases, without the need for the items to be individually scanned, and the store’s inventory control is instantly notified that the items need to be restocked.
All these store-of-the-future elements are already here, courtesy of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging. And that’s only the beginning of the possible applications. The technology is just starting to make its way into retail, but it’s moving fast. And while it’s now being adapted to fit into existing store environments, it won’t be long before the reverse happens: Store design will have to adapt to the technology.
How it works
RFID is enabled by tiny transmitters and receivers that send and detect radio signals, and they can be implanted almost anywhere—on merchandise tags, in the items themselves, on packaging, on shelves and racks or other display apparatus and at the cashwrap.
“You can then read the tags with something as small and portable as a hand-held reader and have a very small footprint,” explains Dr. Venkat Krishnamurthy, chief technology officer of OATSystems Inc. (Waltham, Mass.) and vp of advanced technologies at its Thorofare, N.J.-based parent, Checkpoint Systems Inc., both providers of electronic security and merchandise-management solutions to retailers. “At the other extreme,” says Krishnamurthy, “you could wire up locations to provide real-time inventory all the time.” RFID provides what barcodes don’t: an individual identity for each item. Each identical bottle of shampoo on a store’s shelf has the same barcode and a complete inventory can only be done by hand.
Not surprisingly, most of the interest from retailers so far has been in the areas of inventory control and supply chain management, where the applications are obvious and relatively easy to implement. But Krishnamurthy sees that changing.
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