Japanese efforts to leverage radio frequency identification technology in the nation’s retail environments are expanding as one way to enable self-checkout. The country’s electronic tagging initiative, which launched last year, includes applying ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags to products sold at convenience stores. With the latest expansion, the initiative now focuses on goods at drug stores as well.
Japan has been facing a labor shortage that has impacted the ability of retailers to staff their stores. One potential solution to the problem may be technology to automate in-store processes.
The country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) recently announced its initiative to begin tracking products at drugstores nationwide. This expands on its April 2017 announcement that it was working with five convenience stores to tag all products by 2025, with the aim of not only tracking inventory throughout the supply chain, but also enabling automated checkout in stores. Pilots are currently under way at some retail locations.
Seattle-based Impinj has weighed in on this effort. The company has expressed support of efforts on the part of METI and the retailers as a step in the direction of making sure that every product sold is connected to the internet.
In the meantime, efforts are under way to accomplish automatic checkout with other technologies as well. U.S.-based retailer Amazon last year opened its Amazon Go store, which leverages camera-based, computer-vision, sensor-fusing technology, rather than RFID, to detect what product a consumer takes off the shelf. This creates a virtual shopping cart that is then deducted from a shopper’s credit card (see Amazon Aims to Revolutionize Brick-and-Mortar Shopping). METI and its partner retailers, on the other hand, are moving in the direction of UHF RAIN RFID technology to accomplish automated checkout and inventory tracking.
The technology pilots and deployments in Japan, says Chris Diorio, Impinj’s founder and CEO, are part of a worldwide effort among some retailers to explore how to uniquely identify items that are purchased, as well as which customer bought them, in order to make shopping at brick-and-mortar stores more seamless.
For the convenience store pilot, METI joined forces with 7-Eleven Japan, FamilyMart, Lawson, Ministop and JR East Retail Net to begin testing RFID electronic tags, with a goal of tagging all products sold at the convenience stores by 2025. The companies estimate that this will equate to 100 billion tagged products each year.
Diorio declines to reveal how much Impinj products are, and will be, part of the METI initiative going forward into drug stores, though they have been used in some convenience store deployments. For instance, a pilot at a Lawson convenience store, launched in late 2017, uses RFID for a robotic checkout system known as Regi-robo. A Smartrac Midas FlagTag RFID tag with a built-in Impinj Monza R6 chip has been applied to every product being sold at the store.
Shoppers who arrive at the door take a specialized basket, which they can fill with products. They can then bring the basket to the point of sale (POS) and place it in a receptacle. There, the bottom of the basket releases, dropping the goods into a chamber, where an RFID reader interrogates the tags at the same time that the items are bagged. The prices are collected in the software and displayed on a screen, along with the total price. The shopper can then select an option of how to pay for those items.
In a video detailing the technology, Shinichi Okada, the supervisor of Panasonic‘s Robotics Development Department, said that the technology company’s goal is to enable more than just automatic payments. RFID tagging, he indicated, could help track goods from the point of manufacture and prevent food waste or efficiencies in the supply chain.
Panasonic also launched a demonstration of an RFID system with Trial, in which consumers placed tagged items in their own shopping bag. As they left, they first scanned a payment card, then carried the shopping bag through a Panasonic reader portal. The tags were captured, a total was collected, and funds were then withdrawn from the card. (Panasonic Japan has declined to comment for this story.)
Making these kinds of deployments ubiquitous, however, might still require some engineering to ensure that the tags are affordable and reliable on all products. METI recommends that companies selling RFID tags bring the price down to 1 yen ($0.01) or less, so that they can be attached to even low-value items and be microwave-safe, as well as be able to be attached to metal containers and fit very small packages.
According to a statement issued by METI, the agency and participating vendors and retailers will strive to make electronic tags meet these low-cost, flexible standards. That, Impinj reports, is where it offers its support. The company has already achieved pricing that makes RAIN RFID economical for many use cases in retail, Diorio says. He expects that tag pricing will continue to become more economical for lower-priced items, such as those found in convenience and drug stores.
“From our perspective,” Diorio states, “METI’s vision is in alignment with our own vision to connect everyday items to the internet.” Research and engineering at Impinj, he adds, is focused on enabling low-cost RFID read endpoints, which could be in the form of a traditional RAIN RFID label or tag. It could also be an embedded IC, even using a product’s metallic packaging as an antenna, thereby making the use of RFID less expensive and easier to suit every product’s form factor. Prices will drop, in part, as the volume of tag and IC orders increases. “The vision for us,” he adds, “is to drive the economy of scale.”
METI predicted, in its official statement, that the use of RFID tags could trigger a ripple effect that may start with faster POS experiences for consumers. It could also provide a reduction in shrinkage, as well as improved inventory data and expiration data management.
In addition, Diorio predicts that automated points of sale may continue to leverage a variety of technologies, depending on their particular use cases. “A large number of retailers are trying different technology for consumer checkout to improve their customer service,” Diorio says. “I view RAIN RFID as providing a wealth of benefits from the supply chain to the store,” he states, but adds that cameras and video, Wi-Fi, Near Field Communication (NFC), Bluetooth and other technologies also will be needed for some applications.
Other vendors participating in the project, according to a METI announcement, include Avery Dennison Japan, Dai Nippon Printing, Denso Wave, Toshiba Tec, Toppan Printing, NEC, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Frontech.