Self-service - a preview of a sure future

Today I went to a shopping to buy the remainder of my Christmas presents. When I was checking out at FNAC I've noticed a self-service checkout. As RFID is my present technology focus, I couldn't help to try the concept.

Here's how it works: we pass the products through the bar-code reader (yeap, barcode, not RFID), finalize the order, select the payment mode, pay and exit the store.

I exited the store explaining to my wife how this stuff might work, when the alarm sounded! The self-service wasn't quite as self serviced as we might think, the alarms were supposed to be taken from some girls that missed my checkout. So much for self-service...

My wife then told me the supermarket had an identical system, so I had to check it out. The only difference was a scale to check the height of the products - for security reasons. There was also the need of supervision - the system called her when my wife used the scales to arrange the bags. When item-level tagging hits the stores the process of self serviced checkout has much more that just RFID tags to wonder about.

I didn't find in either of the systems a way to guarantee that all product bar-codes where entered - it's probably a sampling checking. Just a system to guarantee they were put in the bag (the scale), and probably that they weren't swapped (by the weight). But then again, there is no such system on something we put on a pocket, is it?

When I got out I started to look for RFID tags. As expected all the products from FNAC and none from the supermarket had tags. It seems like stores like FNAC, with their higher value products, won't have to wait too long to automate the checkout process with RFID.