IBM RFID Commercial-The Future Supermarket
David Preece1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2020–2024
other · general · evergreen · 2020–2024 on HN
A 2006 IBM commercial depicting a future supermarket where shoppers walk out and RFID automatically charges them for their items.
HN commenters cite it as proof that walk-out shopping was envisioned long before Amazon's version, and as an appealing vision of the future.
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3 comments from Hacker News
Back in 2006 IBM already had predicted how self- checkout should work[1]. Their TV ad made was so cool, so well done and so "I want to live in this world" that became one of my favorites even today: ▶ this video [1] link
Worth the read just for the context around "A much larger problem with RFID than its satanic origins remains the cost of tags" alone. I remember ads from IBM about 20 years ago where a guy walks out of a store with several items looking all shopliftery but cuts to an IBM-logo'd terminal where magic EAS tags have charged his credit card automatically. Edit: ▶ this video
IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006. It wasn't a "Hey, we're making this." ad but more of an, "We're cool because we're working on this, sorta maybe." ad. ▶ this video 14 years later, it's still vaporware. There are a lot of fairly tough problems that need to be solved to make it work. Today, Amazon is probably better positioned to sucker/bully retailers into adopting their solution than IBM is. It remains to be seen if they can actually pull off the tech side of things though. IBM is not a company that's easy to laugh at.