Rheinberg, a quiet town of 25,000 inhabitants about 20 kilometers from Duisburg in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, seems an unlikely place for retail upheaval. It's celebrating 1,000 years as a town in 2003 and during that millennium, the most significant thing that seems to have happened in Rheinberg was that model and, er, actress Claudia Schiffer was born here in 1970. Now it's on the map for another reason: retail giant Metro chose Rheinberg as the site of its Future Store, an outlet for testing all kinds of new technology (including RFID) in a real-life environment. Ms. Schiffer returned home to cut the ribbon on the Future Store at the end of April. Since then, journalists from all over Europe have beaten a path to the town to see all the innovation on display for themselves.
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