How Do RFID Cash Registers Work?

| Tuesday, March 1, 2011
By Owen Jones


The majority of of the most recent outlets and the bigger chain stores use RFID cash registers. RFID cash registers are hooked up to an RFID reader which is utilized to scan the article being bought to get the price, record the sale and control the stock. This way of recording the sale makes it quicker at the check out. It also reduces the human error factor.

Radio Frequency Identification or RFID is similar to utilizing bar codes but they can hold a lot more information and they are usually not taken off after purchase, because passive RFID tags can be really small and can be put under labels on cans of food or sewn into clothing at the point of manufacture. Every tag responds in a different frequency, so the items in a shopping trolley do not even have to be removed to be counted, which is the not the situation with bar codes.

It is unlikely that bar codes will vanish any time soon because they are so commonly used, but the fate of bar codes is surely sealed. They will be replaced. Bar code readers are hand-held, but RFID readers can be in a fixed place, scanning the shopping trolley from about a metre away.

RFID cash registers are bad news for check out clerks, because they can operate far more rapidly than conventional cash registers. You will not have to unload items and check out clerks will not have to hold every object and punch in the prices, so there will be no errors either.

In the future, stores will only have to have check out clerks for patrons who want to pay with cash. Most people pay with a credit or debit card nowadays, so all you would need is a RFID cash register and a credit card swiper so that the patrons can pay.

A superstore that now provides twenty points of sale with twenty check out clerks, could have eighteen RFID cash registers for those with credit cards and two conventional cash registers for customers paying with cash.

In fact, because RFID cash registers are so much quicker, the supermarket could probably do away with five of those points of sale as well without any reduction in service or quality to the customers.

For the merchant, the cost of installing RFID cash registers is not insubstantial, but the costs will be recovered pretty swiftly by the reduction in wages.

RFID cash registers offer superior degrees of stock control than bar code readers because the RFID tag can hold a lot more information than a bar code. Stock control is clearly important, because a merchant neither wants to run out of an item nor have too many of an item tying up money.

RFID cash registers, linked to a computer, can automatically show you which products are selling the best and which items are making the most profit for you. This makes it child's play to order more of the goods at the top of the list and fewer of the items at the bottom.

In fact, even ordering could be automatic according to a set algorithm. The only possible drawback with RFID cash registers is an interruption of the power supply., but you could reduce that inconvenience by having a backup generator.




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