Outdoor Clothing and Equipment Retailer Tests RFID-EAS Tags

At the point of sale, each tagged item being purchased is placed on an RFID reader antenna customized to fit into the sales counter. A salesperson conducts the transaction in the normal fashion, but at the end of the sale, an alert box appears on the sales terminal screen. The box displays a list of items the antenna is reading. If this list matches the purchases that have just been rung up, the salesperson approves the list, generating a command in the RF-iT software that directs the RFID reader to switch each tag's toggle bit to 0. Thus, when the customer walks out of the store, no alarm is triggered. If, however, that person has slipped a product into his jacket or bag in an effort to steal it, the system issues an alert.

Although the RF-iT software can be configured to present an audio or visual alarm, Northland has decided not to use such an option. Instead, the point-of-sale terminal displays a text alert listing which unpaid items were detected, along with detailed descriptions of each. The salesperson then calls the security company that provides guards to patrol the shopping mall in which the store is located. The company dispatches an order to the nearest security guard to search for someone matching the description of the suspect provided by the sales staff. If the suspect is located, the guard can then ask the store's salespeople to name the items believed to have been stolen. (Northland instructs its staff not to confront possible thieves, out of concern for employee safety.)

The store's RFID station includes a printer-encoder for generating RFID labels and a handheld interrogator for taking inventory of tagged goods.

The ability to know the exact items that were taken, and when they left the store, is one of two benefits Northland hopes to exploit, should it opt to roll out the EAS tags across all of its stores. Even if stolen items are not recovered, the retailer can ensure that its inventory is updated to compensate for the loss. The other main benefit the company sees in the system, says Otto Url, the Northland employee responsible for the RFID project, is the cost-savings from combining inventory and security functions on a single tag, rather than attaching separate RFID and EAS tags to each item.

"Northland is preparing to build a case for RFID throughout the company," Lutz says, and if the current proof-of-technology tests prove successful, the retailer plans to move the tagging of apparel to the point of manufacturing. The Graz store test began roughly four weeks ago, and is slated to continue until mid-September, at which point the retailer plans to evaluate the results. No data on whether the system has impacted the store's rate of theft is yet available, though Lutz says that by using handheld interrogators to read the RFID tags on the products, the store is reducing the amount of time required to take an inventory count by 20 percent.

In addition, RF-iT is presently working with a number of other retailers that are testing the use of dual-function RFID tags for item-level tracking and anti-theft applications.