[function_seven]

> You kind of have to experience this in person to see why that works well, but it does :)

Nope. Your description of it is enough. This sounds like a great solution to the bulk goods issue (produce, nuts, beans, etc.)

I love self checkout at Home Depot. It’s just a wireless barcode scanner. No scales or annoying “unknown item in the bagging area” admonishments. Just scan scan scan scan done. You can leave all the items in the cart.

Uniqlo’s self checkout is also cool. All RFID. You dump the clothes into the bin and they instantly tally up on the screen. I didn’t know this the first time I used it, so it was magical.

[dfox]

I remember that in 1991 there was an article (IIRC paid PR by Siemens) how the checkout by RFID is the next big thing that will happen the following year. 20 years later it started to really pop up in the stores in the form of EPC Gen2 RFID for customer-facing applications. The obvious common usecase are libraries, as there is defacto standard extension for exactly that application (the tags can also work as EAS tags that can be enabled/disabled over the EPC radio interface), another huge application are clothing and sporting goods retailers. From extensive playing with the technology I had concluded that the reliability leaves a many things to be wished for, but apparently in these applications either the amount of distinct items is small enough or missing few of them do not really matter (if you scan a whole pallet of EPC tagged items you are bound to miss some of them and thus it is only good as an approximation, if you scan a shopping cart it is probably more reliable. Reason for that is on one hand the physics of the radio interface that can be shadowed by somewhat surprising kinds of objects, like people, and the other is that there is a ridiculously large, but still finite amount of tags that can be de-conflicted and read in a given time).

[r00fus]

Decathlon in France also has RFID bin + digital readout. It is quite magical. It's interesting how much coaching the attendants did so that we would be comfortable (I guess we looked clueless).

[codetrotter]

Yeah same with Decathlon in Spain too. My mind was literally blown when I saw this because I did not know until we were at the checkout.