I hear there is a movement to make bar codes obsolete by putting smart chips* in every product. Then, one just rolls their shopping cart through a scanning device that detects each smart chip (*my term). Is this coming soon? I hear WalMart may already be requiring their vendors to deliver inventory in this format for quicker stocking, etc.
If this is true, will each and every chip have unique encoding? If not, how will the scanner know whether you have two of an item vs. scanning the same item twice? Last, what is the correct name for this technology? - Jinx
The “Next Generation” of barcodes is 2-D coding, with pastterns of black and white squares, rather than 1-D bars, and we’ve had those for a while.
RFID chips will have their place, but black ink on white label is a heckuva lot cheaper.
It is a goal, but the cost is still too high for mass-market items. Several cents per item. Since that is too high for many items, checkout scanners are still needed, so why not use the scanners for all items?
Calling “smart chips” by their common name, RFID chips, gets you a lot more information from Google. If you sort through the OMFG MATRIX HUMAN IMPLANT WTF bullshit you can come away with some useful knowledge. (The biggest real threat seems to be moron countries and corporations using them to control access to things that cost real money, such as subway tickets, and then utterly failing at making them secure.)
RFID
Walmart is trying to require that all of their suppliers have an RFID tag on each pallet that they ship. Long-term the goal is to have each individual item have it’s own tag. At about 10cents each, that’s still to expensive for a lot of stuff.
While it might be a side effect, quicker checkouts isn’t what Walmart is really after. They want RFID for inventory tracking. Rather then having an employee meet each truck and have to record what is on the pallets, they could scan and pick that up. Then they could follow the pallets movement through the warehouse, out to the stores and finally out onto the selling floor. Rather the “Let me check to see if we have any in the back” it could be “pallet 47645 is to the left and is the oldest stock”.
