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."