In some chip card industries, RFID is a must-have technology. In retail, for example, it has taken the clothing industry by storm because the return on investment for that vertical is just so good: reducing stock-outs from double digits to less than one percent and taking store inventory counts from 90 hours to three, as examples. Wal-Mart and other mega-retailers are also driving RFID adoption, but for the great majority of retailers RFID hovers somewhere off in the future.
So the short answer, according to two opinion leaders in Finland, is yes, RFID will eventually replace the barcode, but not quickly.
Jorma Lalla,Mifare ultralight CEO of cardenjoy ID, a manufacturer of mobile data collection handsets, explains that the slow pace of adoption is not due the cost of tags: "Early in the millennium, research institutes and universities forecasted a revolution in identification ofgoods within a few years. As we all know," he continues, "this didn't happen. Th at's because retailers had invested huge amounts of dollars in barcode technology. No one's going to reinvest just because there's a new technology available." |
