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Barcodes are about to go extinct

107 points · 151 comments · rmason

  1. hollow-moe · · focus · HN ↗
    What a bad piece. Optical is obsolete. Decathlon (here in France at least) has RFID on all their products, they're used as anti-theft, automatic tilling: you just put them in a box at the register and it knows what it is (also kills the chips once paid) and very likely they're used all along the logistic chain.
    1. Markoff · · focus · HN ↗
      And 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?
      1. hollow-moe · · focus · HN ↗
        So, 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.
        1. Markoff · · focus · HN ↗
          we were talking about Decathlon, where you put RFID tagged things in self service basket where they are automatically recognized, you can't do this without weighing every item by yourself unless someone weighed it already and put it in some package

          there are pretty much zero packaged pastries (or at least very big majority) over here in many European countries

          I can't imagine how it one hotdog bun worth like 0.1EUR will cover RFID expenses if you wanna use RFID self-service baskets as Decathlon uses

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