GS1 UK Study Touts Retail RFID Results; Introduction to Interesting Chinese Company Waltonchain; Tale of Two AIDC Stocks
Our top news selections from the past week in RFID, automated data collection, and the Internet of Things.
New GS1 UK Study Touts Returns from RFID in Retail
Standards group GS1 recently released a bullish report on the use of RFID in retail.
The report featured case studies from 10 retailers in the US and the Uk, which between them have rolled out 1.9 billion tagged items across their store operations.
But one retailer, the UK’s Marks & Spencer, had a somewhat different take.The report suggests retailers could increase sales from item level RFID programs in-store by ensuring they know where items are and getting them in the right place. The sales bump ranged from 1.5% to 5.5% at the retailers, the report found.
Richard Jenkins, head of loss prevention and RFID at M&S, said isolating the impact of RFID on sales is tricky.
“There’s this expectation of flicking on the switch and instantly seeing a massive sales uplift,” he said. “But to be able to isolate the bit that RFID has delivered – I don’t buy that.”
Jenkins said accurate inventory delivered by RFID helps to get the right products to the right place before they go out of season and are marked down. But sales numbers are also impacted by other factors like the weather and buying volume.
With another view is Martin Speed, safety and loss programs manager at retailer River Island. He said the only time where a sales increase was clearly caused by RFID was during the roll out when some stores had the technology and others didn’t.
“We could compare and we saw that [the stores with RFID] outperformed the ones without by 3.5% – which was well over our ROI” threshold, he said.
Source: RFID, AIDC and IoT News: RFID News Round Up for Feb. 27, 2018