[anigbrowl]

I'm surprised this exists to be honest. Not because of smartphones, but because I thought RFID chips would be sufficiently disposable by now that we'd have smart refrigerators and trashcans. I had to buy a new refrigerator last year and I was struck by how many different kinds of ice dispensers there were (a feature in which I have no interest whatsoever) vs smart refrigerators. I found exactly one of the latter - the unfortunately named T9000 from Samsung (Komm vith me if you vant a snack...), which is really just a refrigerator with a tablet stuck on the front, didn't do very much, was completely locked down (understandable) and cost $4000.

[notatoad]

RFID chips are sufficiently disposable if you can find a use case for them, but they don't really add anything to the average grocery shopping experience. having to take every item out of your cart and pass it over a scanner is a desirable pattern for the grocery store, as it's a great way to prevent theft. They don't want to find a way to eliminate this interaction, so there hasn't been a whole lot of reason put RFID tags on everything in the grocery store.

[chockablock]

Great point about the item-by-item interaction deterring theft. And of course it's not clear how you can use RFID to smooth purchase of items sold in bulk/by weight.

Checkout lines must also be a real profit center with all the high-margin impulse buy items (magazines, snacks, etc) placed there.

[SethMurphy]

I agree, this is just a Cuecat + wifi, which is actually great. Scanning barcodes is really not that much fun, and can get frustrating because of moisture, wear or just plain hard to find barcodes. An RFID system could avoid much of this. That being said if it took them 5 years to figure out the economic model for delivery, I imagine cheap (free) barcodes was a major factor in this decision.