Putting a chip on everything sounds wasteful and worse for the environment than a printed piece of paper. Not the right direction to go in.
replyThe chips are sub-cents per unit in terms of cost and weigh milligrams.
RFID chips come in many flavours the ones most used are passive, i.e. basically just a bunch of wires printed on a tiny piece of carrier material. The label on a shirt contains more resources by weight.
replyReally only wires, or is there still a (tiny) chip on there somewhere?
replyWhile it can indeed be helpful as an indication, cost often doesn't factor in externalities such as pollution during production, and recycling after use. Paper has much fewer problems in those areas.
100% agreed, but if you truly want to go down that route, you'll quickly find that basically NOTHING has externalities priced in. If you truly were to do that (which I'm personally not opposed to), prices of pretty much all goods and services would need to be adjusted.
replyIt's ok, these will go right next to the trillions of cigarette buds thrown in nature each year and probably the trillion of trillion microplastics and nanoplastics shed each year.
replyNothing to see here and there can't be any possible negative consequences when people are making so much money.
Decathlon does it in every country, not just France. Same with Uniqlo and a few others, but it's still only very large chains that can afford it
replyUniqlo does it in the states now. It’s the first time I encountered it though (well, except for Uniqlo in Japan, even Muji is still using bar codes).
replyToo pricey for food, it’s cheaper to print.
replyPrinted Chipless RFID Will solve that problem if the tech really works.
replyPassive ones can be less than a cent per unit.
replyInk is cheaper.
replyI've worked in wholesale logistics (backend for inventory management) for many years way back when and let me tell you, cost of ink vs cost of a chip the least of the problems. Barcodes (and QR codes as used here) have two major flaws: reading them is challenging (works fine if the package is undamaged and you TRUST that it contains what it says on the box) and they're still just a number. RFID can help with both these issues and the savings from that can outweigh the additional cost by a lot.
replyUtility is key and RFID has a lot of advantages over bar codes (and QR codes).
Not if you include the cost of the employee scanning the bar codes.
replyEven if the customers does it, it still takes a lot more time and space than scanning a basket full of RFIDs labels. It literally takes seconds.
Merchandise point-of-sales tags isn't the only use of barcode or QR codes. Hospitals aren't going to start putting RFID for all equipment, files, and patients.
replyI thought that was exactly one of things RFID was used for?
replyPerhaps not for files, but definitely for equipment.
Wouldn't an MRI fry an RFID chip? Seems like a big issue for anything in a hospital.
replyI am quite sure they still use optical on the German shops.
replyNope, at least the Berlin shop is on RFID on all products.
replyYeah, unless they changed on NRW shop on my area since August.
replyMy diving mask and backpack certainly went through optical.
Not in Berlin, not in Hamburg
replyI guess NRW is exceptional, or had broken devices in August.
replyAnd what is average price of one product in Decathlon compared to Lidl? Apples and oranges. How do you put RFID on fruit, vegetables and pastry btw. or you propose wrapping everything in unnecessary packaging?
replySo, depending on the place you don't weigh your vegetables in the aisles anymore, you know: low trust society and such. Either the cashier does it or yourself under the eye of the automated register CCTV. For places that still does they can just migrate to do it at the register and save the price of the barcode stickers and the printer. Pastries are either in boxes already barcoded so just stick an RFID instead or counted at the register by the cashier or yourself too. And nowadays RFID stickers cost nothing at that scale.
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