Best Buy Joins RFID Pack

Filed in archive Retail on September 1, 2004

Best Buy, the U.S. "big box" retailer, announced that it plans to deploy electronic product code technology over the next several years. It will require major suppliers to use EPC-compliant tags at the pallet and case level by January 2006.

Best Buy joins Target, Wal-Mart, Metro and Tesco in announcing mandates for using RFID.

But there is one big difference: Best Buy's goods tend to be much higher priced. That means the tag issue is not nearly the problem it is with lower-priced goods. Paul Freeman, RFID program director for Best Buy, is quoted in an RFID Journal article as saying:

"We have found with our suppliers that the tag cost is not nearly the deal breaker that it is for consumer product goods manufacturing," he says. "And a lot of our cases have a single item, so we can get some traction on item-level."