For many years, wide-scale adoption and use of radio frequency-based identification (RFID) tags and labels have been held back by the general perception of this technology as a high-tech luxury―a glorified barcode that could cost in the neighborhood of five dollars per tag, compared to fractions of a penny it costs to use the good, old conventional barcodes. Great technology, the thinking went, but largely unnecessary. But times have changed in a hurry, and many producers of packaged consumer goods have been given the word from above: embrace RFID, or be left out in the cold. The biggest shock to the status quo of product identification in the retail world was delivered about a year ago by the Big Box colossus Wal-Mart, which in one swift diktat ordered its top 100 suppliers to insert RFID tagging and tracking on all their cases and pallets, with the rest of the suppliers given just one extra year to do the same.
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