Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The technology needed for printing RFID tags is slowly maturing. Make that very slowly maturing, to the point where they are still years away.

At IntertechPira’s Printed RFID conference, held earlier this month in Frankfurt, Germany, execs said the reality of printed RFID tags directly onto packaging is still far off, according to this RFIDJournal story. IDTechEx President Raghu Das predicted that most of the 1.91 billion passive and active tags purchased in 2007 will not be printed at all, though antennas and other UHF tag parts might be. However, he claimed, nearly 50 percent of the 670 billion tags purchased in 2017 will be fully printed.…

Traditional arguments against item-level RFID use is that it only makes economic sense for products costing more than $100. But that assumes one-time use. With a trial with re-usable tags, Staples is throwing out all the old rules.

Staples in Canada started its trial this month at one of its Montreal stores, selectively tagging about 2,000 items representing some 300 SKUs out of the 7,500 SKUs in a typical location, said Joe Soares, director of process engineering for Staples and Business Depot. The tags themselves are higher-end active tags, which would typically cost Staples between $5 and $8 each. For the six-week trial, though, Soares said, "it's not costing us anything" because the costs are being picked up by partners, including Fujitsu and AbsoluteSky.

Shoe chain Aerosoles is one of many retailers trying to figure how far they can go in the multi-channel race.

In talking with lots of retail marketing and IT execs recently, there appears to be this growing realization—concession?—that a true multi-channel approach is a shock to the retail system. Indeed, even the word "multi-channel" sends the wrong message. Isn't that the opposite of the true goal? Perhaps the phrase "merged channels" is closer, with "multi-channel" usually a pseudonym for what Google's head of retailing has dubbed "multi-silo-ed."Read more...

Best Buy CIO Bob Willett is arguing that RFID can be a huge boost for retailers, but only if they can convince people they won’t abuse the data.

Willett, in a keynote address at the ERIexchange show in Boston this week, credited some RFID trials with already boosting sales in some isolated areas, according to this story in Computerworld. “Before I’m carried away in a box, I’d like to see checkouts gone from the store,” Willet said. “The technology is there to do it today with RFID. The first major retailer that can do it will be remembered forever and a day as a champion of the consumer.”…

When Hewlett-Packard this week unveiled its prototype Retail Store Assistant—a kiosk that offers customized individualized promotions transmitted directly to a customer's smartphone—it took a business pragmatic position in the personal shopper battle.

There's little debate that customized shopping—taking the CRM customer-specific data one major step beyond the minimally effective coupons at the end of checkout—is almost certainly going to be a key in-store technology over the next few years, especially with grocers. But the form that this customized shopping will take is a key debate.Read more...

Retailers globally will likely spend $120 billion on IT this year, a figure that--as a percentage--is actually low compared with other industries, according to information published Tuesday by the IHL Consulting Group.

"Retailers individually spend well below other industries, about one-third of the amount per revenue dollar compared to financial services and insurance," said IHL President Greg Buzek.

Low tag read rates are still preventing RFID from gaining the necessary survival momentum as of mid-2007, even though the potential benefits are looking more attractive, according to a report issued Tuesday from U.K.-based RFID analyst firm IDTechEx.

"The tagging of pallets and cases to meet retail mandates is still struggling to take off," said IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das. "This year, IDTechEx expect that only 375 million tags will be used for this sector, the main reason for this is that the read performance is still not satisfactory for most companies. For example, George Chapelle, CIO of Sara Lee, reports that on frozen and dry foods they achieve about a 70 percent read rate, and on chilled foods the read rates is about 30 percent using Gen 2 tags. With such poor read rates, they cannot realize internal benefits."

The Staples Businesss Depot, which bills itself as Canada’s largest supplier of office supplies, is launching an RFID trial to test realtime inventory tracking, the chain announced Thursday.

The retailer said it plans to “tag thousands of items that will be dynamically tracked in real-time–at long range– from entering into store inventory, to store shelves, through to completion of the sales transaction,” according to a statement. “In addressing privacy concerns, the RFID tags are not concealed on the items and are re-usable. They are physically detached when the item is sold to the customer at a Staples Business Depot store.”…

In a psychologically fascinating "grass is always greener on the other side of the firewall" scenario, states see the industry's PCI as the perfect security standard. And retail CIOs are salivating for Sarbanes-Oxley-like controls.

This comes to mind as we look at two aspects of the PCI world this week. Recent reports about PCI have raised questions about how many retailers are truly PCI certified as well as problems with PCI administration itself, including conflicts of interest, inconsistent enforcement and retail confusion. But several states, including Minnesota and Texas, want to make PCI their state's legal requirement for retailers operating within their borders.

Leveraging existing Wi-Fi investments and applying it to asset tracking is behind an expect sharp and ongoing increase in Wi-Fi RFID tag shipments, according to a new report from market analyst firm In-Stat.

"Despite some hurdles to overcome, Wi-Fi RFID tag shipments will grow at more than 100 percent annually through 2010," In-Stat said. Added In-Stat analyst Daryl Schoolar: "Historically, one of the key weaknesses of this market has been the short battery life of asset tags," but technology advancements are making "multi-year battery life now a reality."

The $81 billion European retail chain Metro Group is moving ahead with its Asian RFID supplier program, promoting a kick-off program today for 30 partners at the Hong Kong Science & Technology Park.

The "Tag It Easy" pilot is officially part of an initiative that Metro is calling Advanced Logistics Asia (ALA), which helps consumer goods manufacturers to apply RFID labels on shipments from Hong Kong to Germany.

As mobile computing devices start invading in-store operations—both what customers bring into the stores and what the stores will hand to those customers—the very nature of in-store networking is likely to undergo a dramatic change.

Consider this scenario: A customer walks into a favorite retail outlet and grabs a handheld shopping helper from a rack near the entrance. The handheld unit can communicate with RFID-enabled smart-shelves and their tagged item-level cousins, as well as signal digital signage to change based on the CRM profile of the approaching customer.Read more...

If you're going to be in the Boston area June 5th and 6th, would love to hook up with some of you at the ERIexchange show at The Boston Convention Center.

That show is actually shaping up to be quite significant, with keynotes from BestBuy CIO Bob Willett, CircuitCity CIO Bill McCorey and Metro Group managing director Gerd Wolfram, among other notables.Read more...

One piece of legislation that is now winding its way from the U.S. Senate to the U.S. House of Representatives prohibits pharmaceuticals from using RFID in anti-conterfeiting measures, according to this interesting story in RFID Update.

Although pharma and government uses of RFID are quite distinct from retail deployments, this effort–which is far from final–does signal several things that could impact retail RFID efforts.

First, it signals that the current legislative climate is open to severe RFID restrictions, which is a foreboding trend with consumer privacy protection issues in the wings. Secondly, pharma is a potential massive user of RFID. Anything that materially reduces that is going to impact volume pricing for all RFID uses. Much of the current RFID tag price reduction projections have assumed more-than-healthy pharma deployments. All said, it’s an important piece of legislation to watch. …

A new report has emerging technology–which it defines as electronic shelf labels, RFID and self-checkout terminals–shipments hitting $238 million by next year among European retailers. That’s about 52 percent more than the $157 million worth that the Venture Development Corporation (VDC) report estimated was shipped last year.

“While in the near term, traditional technologies will still dominate the market, these emerging technologies are expected to experience long-term growth due to technology refresh cycles, increasing end-user comfort levels (as a result of field-proven ROI with these technologies), and rapid price erosion in order to remain competitive,” said Andrew Nathanson, Director of VDC’s Automatic Identification and Data Collection Practice. “In order for the market to reach its full potential, retailers must view these emerging technologies as a mechanism for strategic pricing, inventory control and management, and a method in which to improve customers’ in-store experience — not merely a replacement for traditional technologies.”…

Throughout the five-month public history of the TJX data breach fallout, the industry has repeatedly tried to simplify it, to label one cause as the explanation, whether it was incompetent IT execution, an inside job, an open wireless port or some other clean explanation. But the TJX situation is complex, complicated and defies a simple explanation, just as their intruders were a lot more sophisticated, creative, relentless, daring and professional than anyone in the industry wants to believe.

A 5-second glance at the latest details has led many people to dismiss this as another wireless problem. The truth is that TJX offered intruders a generous smorgasbord of security holes, enabling the intruders to plant a trojan horse, steal an encryption key, sidestep less-than-diligently-monitored traffic logs and be able to grab credit card data before it was to be encrypted. So let's not paint TJX as security Eagle Scouts who happened to let their guards down on wireless.

Two security firms have crafted a fully-functional credit card with a tiny monitor and button that will issue one-time passwords. But whether any banks will offer the expensive formfactor is another question.

The concept of the card is powerful and timely, as retailers are desperately trying to improve POS security, especially for E-Commerce transactions. With thefts of credit-card identifying data growing rampant, the idea of an authentication code that—in theory—couldn't possibly be stolen from some retailer's database is quite compelling.

The world's largest retailer on Tuesday reaffirmed it's support for RFID, citing one-third fewer out-of-stocks, slashing of excess supply chain inventory and reduced customer waits.

In a statement issued Tuesday, Wal-Mart CIO Rollin Ford said that RFID-supported pallet locators are now being used at Wal-Mart subsidiary Sam's Club "increasing inventory accuracy and reducing member waiting time as well as future benefits in pharmacy accuracy, grocery freshness, software, CD and DVD authentication, and 30-second store checkouts."

Checkpoint Systems on Tuesday will introduce a combined tag product, which is designed to deliver EPC inventory and item-level tracking along with EAS anti-theft capabilities. But the move has prompted an unusual amount—and diversity--of criticism, ranging from privacy and health risk issues to standardization and support for retail returns.

What Checkpoint rolled out on Tuesday—in the backyard of Disneyworld—was a new family of dual-function labels called Evolve. The line appears to be the first product to attempt to merge the inventory and anti-theft measures. The patent-pending line will be Gen2-compliant and will operate in the UHF band of 860 to 960 MHz, but at 8.2 MHz for RF-EAS systems, according to Checkpoint.Read more...

Although retailers have loudly complained about credit card fees for years, 2007 is suddenly seeing a surge in active support for alternative payments. The credit card companies aren't worried, but perhaps they should be.

Just in the last couple of weeks, the number of major E-Commerce sites accepting alternative payments has almost tripled, Wal-Mart has bucked the industry trend to support e-checks and two major national retail chains are going to try accepting alternative payments at their brick-and-mortars. Three strikes and you're out.

When EPCGlobal finally banged heads together to get an industry standard set of descriptors EPC data this month, it said that it would allow—for the first time—consistent data comparisons along the supply chain. A co-chair of one of the key working groups within EPCGlobal tried using the proposed standard's rollout as a way of giving RFID a second chance.

Bryan Tracey, co-chair of the Software Action Group at EPCglobal, said "people were not supposed to be getting ROI until they started sharing data" in a standardized way and that any ROI until now "has been pure luck."

A company called Pump Media got together with Chevron and concluded that the source of sorrow was a consumer deprivation of television commercials while pumping gas. Fret no more, America, because these two altruistic groups have lept to your defense.

They have joined Chevron's video-at-the-pump program where, according to a joint news release, they will be "entertaining motorists while they refuel" while running for the captive pumpers "targeted, high-impact and meaningful audio and video content."("No, no," Chevron officials wanted to say, "no need to thank us.")Read more...

For years, Asia has taken the lead in anything that intersects consumers and wireless, with Europe one notch behind Asia and the U.S. a good two notches behind Europe. It should be no surprise that the same pattern had emerged with the rolling out of various contactless applications, especially RFID-embedded credit/debit cards.

With that in mind, this story from CardTechnology is quite eye-opening, with a look at how Asian consumers are simply not taking to a major Japanese trial with contactless mobile-wallet phones from telco NTT DoCoMo and a major railroad.

Some 13 months after its much-anticipated launch in January 2006, only 350,000 customers had signed up for the mobile service. That’s only about a third of what the commuter rail operator had expected. Nor was 2006 a breakthrough year for any of Japan’s other contactless payment schemes that have launched service on wallet phones, known as “Osaifu-Keitai” in Japan. This piece is definitely worth reading if you’re considering any contactless payment project this year.…

An alliance between the FBI and two retail groups–called the Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network (LERPnet)–has great potential, but it is still hampered by the same weaknesses that undermine most retail security today: apathetic employees.

The premise is simple: by sharing the data, crime patterns could be detected much more quickly across jurisdictions, which would both reduce the length of a fraud spree as well as making it more likely to catch the fraudsters.

The approach is indeed attractive and will prove helpful, but it is still based on employee attentiveness and caring. As long as cashiers are incentized solely on speed and have no incentive to catch thieves, the bad guys have got a huge advantage.…

Coke apparently considers contactless payment the real thing, as Coca-Cola, the nation’s third-largest bottler, moved to support cashless vending machines.

The soft-drink giant issued a rather non-effervescent statement confirming the move. “The United States is rapidly becoming a ‘plastic nation’ with fast food restaurants and convenience stores accepting credit and debit cards,” said Coca-Cola marketing VP Thacher Worthen. “We feel the time is right to begin providing these same payment options to our customers.”

Note from the Blog Editor about this photo: On the one hand, this is a perfect picture as it depicts a soft-drink contactless payment vending machine. I hope Coke doesn’t get too upset because of the beverage displayed. One can only get so picky when dealing with generic stockart. …