"Edward M. Lerner - The Day of the RFIDs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

was selling.) It wasn't like I was pushing new technology. I had lost the argument, of course. Tech was
never Dad's thing, so you can imagine how he felt about putting serious money into it.

By the time I had finished college, I had seen at the big-box stores the technology that was fast replacing
barcodes--and there were Mom and Dad still punching prices into old cash registers, still walking the
aisles to decide what to reorder when. They were doomed ... without my help, anyway.
****
Through These Portals
Pass the Best-Fed Mortals.
****
Growing up, the carefully hand-lettered sign on the store's entrance seemed clever. It might even have
been true once. But time marched on and "portal" came to mean Yahoo! and AOL. As the sign faded,
the clientele, looking progressively too well-fed, gained paunches and lost hair. And outside of the
undertaking business, an ever-aging clientele is bad news.

That's how, new-and-fascinating EE day job notwithstanding, I came to spend hours each week in
big-box emporia. On weekends, their cavernous aisles echoed with a chittering, droning, buzzing sound
that would make seventeen-year cicadas proud. But it was for a good cause.

The barcode technology Mom and Dad had yet to accept was fast being replaced by radio frequency ID
tags: RFIDs. That's "are-fids," if you prefer to speak your acronyms (and like triffids, if you favor the
classics). While a barcode can be read only when in line of sight--you've seen the red laser beams at
checkouts--the coded microwave pulses to which an RFID tag responds are omni-directional. One
invisible, inaudible, electromagnetic ping! and the whole jumbled contents of a cartful of books or
CDs--or groceries--declares itself.

An RFID tag would never be as inexpensive as ink lines printed on a label. Still, a tag was simple
electronics. The couple cents an RFID tag costs were insignificant compared to the faster, foolproof
checkout it enabled.

"You're so good at spotting new products before they become hot," Dad began saying. I understood his
surprise: Did you know just one in ten new food products survives even a year? After a few
demonstrations (I called both Yebeg Wot, an Ethiopian lamb-in-red-pepper-sauce dish, and organic
mushroom burgers before either was featured in Grocers Weekly), he began stocking pre-trendy--and
high-margin--ready-to-go meals on just my "intuition."

I knew better than to try an explanation. The RFID scanner in my pocket, its sensitivity boosted by a few
tricks I'd mastered in college, invisibly polled the carts of every shopper exiting whatever big-box retailer
I chose to loiter by. Dump the data into a PC, sort, and voil├а: market research. But catching fads was
only postponing the inevitable, unless--fat chance--Mom and Dad could match big-box volume and
buying power.

At this point I was actually starting to feel a bit like Charles Boyer, whom I had finally gotten around to
scoping out on imdb. Boyer had done a ton of movies and TV I'd never heard of, and a few I had. In a
world of 500-channel digital cable, "The Rogues" was always on some network. Damned if he wasn't
suave, and who doesn't like to see scoundrels get their comeuppance?

So, in a way, Plan B was Dad's fault.

RFID applications are not limited to checkout. The newest thing in groceries is smart shelves. Picture a