- Image via Wikipedia
Think about this: you go to a retail store to buy some good California wine. You take your chosen bottle of wine in your hand, aim your mobile phone at an RFID device on it, and voila, you get a video of the entire process by which your particular bottle of wine was made, right from the vines of Sonoma county, the distilling, the bottling, and the transportation. Wouldn’t that be the best sort of advertisement for a bottle of wine, compared to another bottle which does not have an equally sound pedigree?
If you think this is a dream that will never come true in your lifetime, think again. Some Japanese stores already allow customers to read bar codes using mobile phones, and at least one giant retailer in Germany allows a similar facility using RFID.
The giant German grocery store Metro AG has developed a grocery store called the Future Store where every item is tagged with RFID. Not only so, every shelf also has an RFID reader where customers can see details of their purchases. Customers can search for items within the store using keyword search boxes, and get every detail about a product before they actually buy it. They can also check out the products themselves without having to wait in lines.
The latest development in the concept is the launch of a software mobile application which you download and install on your own mobile. This application does away the need for on shelf RFID readers; customers can use their own mobiles to find out the same details about purchase items. What is more, mobile phones can be used even to plan your purchase, where the application will provide you with data necessary for you to choose what item you want to buy.
We can only hope that similar technology will develop and spread to other countries so that those frustrating waiting in lines at grocery stores can be done away with. Even better, customers can actually have real information about goods before purchasing, for a change, rather than finding defects later.