Personal Technology

Raising the bar (code)

Bob Croslin/tbt*

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."

Who's doing it?: 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. The chain has outfitted 104 of its 3,600 stores and three distribution centers. The goal is 600 stores and 12 distribution centers by October.

The spex: 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.

What about humans?: 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.

Cost: 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.

Accuracy: 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.

Glitches: 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.

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 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.

What about cost?

The price of one tag is extremely high -- 40 cents. The cost of wiring a discount store is about $100,000.

Who's using it?

Wal-Mart has outfitted 104 out of 3,600 stores and three distribution centers, but you won't see it at the checkout counter for at least three years.

- Mark Albright albright@tampabay.com