How will the “10bn electronic tags at convenience stores” campaign being pitched by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) change people’s daily lives? That was the issue addressed by the weekly magazine Shukan Jitsuwa in its 11–18 May edition.
The programme, in which METI has enlisted Japan’s five largest convenience store chains, aims to attach to merchandise product-identification tags using radio-frequency identification technology. By 2025, it is planned they will cover all of the 100bn items sold annually in Japan’s convenience stores. Customers will merely need to place their shopping baskets on a special platform and the charge will be tallied almost instantly.
“Self-checkout cash registers by which the customer scans the barcodes on products, pays and then bags his or her own goods were introduced some years back”, a journalist covering the retail industry told the magazine.
“But for items sold individually or in small bunches, such as fruit and vegetables, in most shops it was necessary to respond to a display on a touch screen, which elderly people in particular found difficult to manage. There were also cases where parents allowed their small children to play with the machines while making purchases, defeating the purpose of the technology, which was to reduce customer waiting time”.
With the new system, all products carried by a shop will bear an electronic tag containing pricing and other data, and scanning individual items will no longer be required, resulting in faster transactions.
“While enabling management to reduce labour costs by simplifying these tasks, at the same time sales data can be processed, eliminating the need for taking inventory. In the future the system is likely to catch on quickly”, the journalist added. “As total turnover at convenience stores has already surpassed sales at the nation’s department stores, I think that … there will be a growing number of this new type of shop”.
Still, it will probably feel a bit lonely to walk into a shop and no longer see a uniformed attendant offer a lively irasshaimase (welcome), Shukan Jitsuwa’s writer remarked.