At all Uniqlo’s stores in the U.S. and Canada, shoppers can checkout simply by placing their goods in bins of automated stations. Unlike the self-checkout process at many stores, customers of the casual apparel retailer don’t need to scan individual items or look up prices on a screen—they can simply drop their items in a bin and pay.
Newer and cheaper RFID chips, reader hardware, and software are enabling retailers to implement the technology at lower cost and with more precision. The cost of RFID tags has fallen from 60 cents a tag a few decades ago to 4 cents a tag, and reader hardware has improved in range and accuracy.
RFID has resulted in significant reduction in out-of-stock items on the Uniqlo sales floor, and has contributed to improving customer satisfaction. While the most common use for RFID is improving inventory management (a topic we address on page 496 in Chapter 12), the use of RFID at self-checkout machines is gaining traction as more apparel retailers explore ways to apply the technology once their merchandise has been tagged. Most apparel brands plan to implement RFID this year or next.
The unique benefit of an RFID-based checkout system is that it is faster and more accurate than barcode-based self-checkout machines. Many retailers still rely on printed bar codes, which require manual scanning and are more limited in the data they carry. Since Uniqlo rolled out the machines, customers have reduced their wait time at checkout by 50%. Computer vision (see page 291 in Chapter 7), a form of artificial intelligence that analyzes images, is still too expensive for widespread use for self-checkout and inventory management.
Classroom discussion questions:
- How does RFID work? What are its strengths and limitations?
- Why is RFID implementation speeding up at retailers?