Are Any Courier Companies or Parcel-Delivery Firms Tracking Final Deliveries With RFID?

None of the major courier companies are tracking individual parcels to the point of delivery with radio frequency identification technology. All of them have looked into RFID, but these companies have already invested a lot of money in bar-code systems.

Unlike most firms, these companies are able to read bar codes on randomly oriented boxes in their sorting facilities. They also employ workers to deliver items, who can scan bar codes at each point along the process.

There would undoubtedly be some incremental benefits from eliminating the manual scanning of bar codes, but at the current cost of passive tags, it would not be cost-effective to switch over. I would expect that as tag prices fall and the technology proliferates, however, many of these businesses will eventually adopt RFID.