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CHECK OUT THE NEW CHECKOUT

With this small wireless tag slapped on a product, retailers will get a way to track inventory from their truck to your car. And then send you a bill.

If you consider the self-checkout registers at Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Winn-Dixie a dangerous precedent, be advised: This is just the start.

The checkout lane of the not-so-distant future has no register.

No clerk.

Not even a laser scanner.

Just wheel your cart past an antenna hidden in the door frame that tallies the bill and charges your account.

"Right now we can scan 1,000 items a second from up to 30 feet," said Tom Coyle, senior vice president of IconNicholson, a New York firm that developed a wireless checkout for a Prada boutique in SoHo. "The radio waves don't penetrate liquids like milk or metal foil yet, but we're close."

For years the techies selling such gee-whiz gadgetry have been pushing retailers to buy into this Jetsons vision. Now they have drummed up enough money for liftoff on the tool that makes the wireless store possible. Led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., three of the world's biggest retailers and 137 of their top suppliers last month began working the kinks out of the basic building block of radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags.

Most retailers are sitting this one out. Yet about 11 percent of U.S. retail companies plan to spend something on RFID in 2005, up from about 5 percent last year. They foresee a long trek of experimentation (switching on one recent Wal-Mart experiment accidentally shut down a nearby freezer) driven mainly by the prospect of cheaper and more efficient logistics.

RFID tags would replace the bar code - the little 28-digit strip of stock-keeping unit numbers read by laser scanners. Smaller than a pinhead and thinner than a greeting card, the more sophisticated 128-bit computer chips come attached to a small antenna. Glued to a product, the transmitter broadcasts a signal that identifies each item plus its color, size, maker and date of manufacture. That means its path can be traced in real time from manufacturer to truck, warehouse and store down to the exact shelf until a customer takes it out the door.

RFID applications formed the backbone of the latest store-of-the-future put together by 23 vendors ranging from Intel to Cisco at the recent National Retail Federation convention in New York. They automated just about every sales task in a store.

"It puts the shopper in the middle of a computer," said Jack Reader, business development manager for Cisco Systems retail practice.

Wave an item over a kiosk and a video answers product questions. Key in the title of book and a ceiling spotlight leads a shopper to the book's position on the shelf. Video displays on the shelves update prices as well as tell a shopper how many yellow sweaters his size are in each pile.

Take the sweater off the shelf to caress the fabric. The inventory on a shelf display drops by one.

A clerk - the computers can summon one if they're around - could quickly track down a sweater misplaced in the wrong pile.

The techies didn't forget the sales person. The clerks are tricked out with a tiny necklace communicator equipped with voice recognition. That replaces the beeper, the cell phone and the walkie-talkie that many multitasking discount store workers lug around today.

Retailers have resisted technology advances that customers don't regard as an enhancement of their shopping experience.

These days, however, customer expectations have been lowered by minimally trained sales people and shrunken sales staffs. That has trained more impatient shoppers to be willing to step in and do the clerk's job.

"The No. 1 shopper concern today is, "How do I avoid standing in line?' " said Neil Z. Stern, a Chicago retail consultant and author of Winning Retail. "So stores want to put the customer in control of the process."

As the Internet matures, retailers are shedding their fear of technological change. Once it was predicted that online shopping was going to put stores out of business. Today, all of the big online shopping sites except eBay and Amazon.com are run by old retailers with stores.

"The Internet has proven to be the brick-and-mortar retailer's best friend," said Bob Michaels, president and chief operating officer of General Growth Properties Inc., one of the nation's biggest mall operators. "People use it to gather product information and make price comparisons, then usually they buy it in a store."

Indeed, retailers are warming up to tech advances.

Olly, a Canadian shoe chain, developed a computer program to measure children's feet and match them to the inside dimensions of every shoe in the store. Wine merchant Vino Venue in San Francisco created a self-serve machine that pours 1-ounce samples of 100 wines for $1 to $150. McDonald's, which is installing touch-screen ordering, is testing vending devices that sell disposable DVD movies.

One fast-growing new retailer is Nuvo International, which brings dermatology treatments such as chemical peels, laser skin treatments and Botox injections to the local mall.

RFID is being sold to retailers as an elixir for their industry's worst affront to customer service: the empty shelf.

Being out of stock is a cardinal sin. Customers find rain checks an annoying waste of a trip. Stores cannot sell from an empty shelf. Worse, the missing item is usually in a back room or en route in a truck because few stores stock shelves around the clock.

Yet, a startling 8 percent of products are missing or out of stock at any given time. For products being promoted as a special deal, it's 15 percent. About 2 percent of goods - more than $50-billion worth - simply vanish in the retail distribution system. Half of that ends up in the hands of shoplifters, the other half with dishonest employees.

To overcome such inefficiencies, businesses purposely let inventory pile up in warehouses.

Oversupply is a profit-gobbler that is the major reason why 78 percent of apparel must be discounted to sell.

Worldwide, Cisco estimates out-of-stock items are a $325-billion profit opportunity if manufacturers and stores can eliminate warehouse space and lose less stuff. For a company the size of Publix Super Markets Inc. that's $900-million a year - in profit.

Procter & Gamble Co., which makes everything from Crest to Folger's coffee and Tide, estimates it carries 40 percent more inventory than it needs just to keep the pipeline full. Retail productivity gains, largely driven by the bar code in the past decade, has been able to cut its delivery schedules from monthly to weekly.

"They want to get to daily and have like a warehouse on wheels," said Larry Kellum, former RFID director for P&G. "It's like a moving truck that's diverted en route to the store that needs it."

Because every item can be traced from the moment it leaves the assembly line to final sale, companies will know where everything is.

Most big retailers are letting rivals do the heavy lifting on RFID experiments. They see plenty of efficiencies left to wring from data gathered by today's laser scanning. About half of retail tech investment this year will replace current checkout systems that have a five- to seven-year life. Most companies see no reason to pay for a rival's RFID beta test.

"We aren't going out there on the bleeding edge of technology," said Terry Lundgren, chairman and chief executive of Federated Department Stores Inc., "We'll wait until the customer accepts it."

Indeed, proponents are companies that use tech investments as a competitive edge.

"This is not about tags, it's about using them to re-engineer the whole supply process," said Linda Dillman, Wal-Mart chief information officer. "Our associates will spend more time loading freight and less time figuring out where and when to move it."

Wal-Mart has outfitted 104 of its 3,600 stores and three distribution centers. The goal is 600 stores and 12 distribution centers by October.

The other big global retailers experimenting with RFID are Tesco Group in the United Kingdom and Metro A.G. in Germany. Both are Wal-Mart competitors in Europe.

They've got a long way to go. RFID has neither international nor industry standards. The price of one tag - 40 cents - is staggeringly high. The cost of wiring a discount store is about $100,000, according to A.T. Kearney, a consulting firm.

Retailers are tagging goods only in mass shipments. Chains won't tag products in a store until the tag price falls below a dime. That could be as soon as three years - if enough other retailers follow.

RFID tags on pallets of goods are being read correctly 99.9 percent of the time at Wal-Mart. Accuracy slips to 98 percent on tags on moving conveyor belts. In cases or boxes, however, the read rate drops to 66 percent.

Some tales from the front are a hoot. Wal-Mart lost tons of products for two days until it discovered a dead spot in the RFID network. Signals from one vendor's tags shut off another vendor's refrigeration unit.

To meet Wal-Mart's deadline to be RFID-ready last month, some suppliers just "slapped and shipped" tags on cases until precise procedures are written.

"It's simple and works," Colin Cobain, information tech director of Tesco, proclaimed just moments before his demonstration before 5,000 retail executives didn't work.

RFID has alarmed civil liberties and privacy groups. They conjure visions of Big Brother or the Boston Strangler following you home via your Cheerios. The industry has arguments to silence critics.

Shoppers will have to give permission, just like they do signing up for a store loyalty card that allows a retailer to track their purchases in return for some discounts.

Or the store can disable tags when a customer leaves. Developers say the information in the chip memory is meaningless.

"If you can't link to the store's database of personal information, the RFID code is gibberish," said Ann Grackin, founder of ChainLink Research of Cambridge, Mass.

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or 727 893-8252.