Metro Future Store

Map and text indicating where RFID is used

The images below are from METRO's customer brochure titled "RFID: A New Technology For Your Shopping Experience." (To view the full brochure, click here: inside outside). These brochures are prominently displayed at the customer service desk near the store entrance. METRO touts the brochure as part of its "full disclosure" and "openness" policy.

Map and list of RFID applications in METRO's "Future Store" in Rheinberg, Germany scanned from
the store's customer information brochure

Overview of RFID in the METRO Future Store

Now that I have toured the store and seen the applications for myself, I can attest that the store contains:

Reader gates (people walk through these) at four locations:

3 gates aligned at the store's front entrance
(Of course, you can't help but wonder why METRO would install RFID scanners for customers coming into the store. Read "Scandal: RFID in Loyalty Card" for one explanation.)
One gate between the external loading dock and the store room
2 gates at merchandise entry from store room to the sales floor
5 pairs of gates at checkout - one for each checkout lane

Two RFID Kiosks:

1 informational kiosk for shoppers at the back of the store (provides RFID information on a touch-screen and serves as a tag reader device)
1 "Easy Deactivation" station next to the customer service counter that serves as both a reader device and a supposed deactivator

(See "Scandal: Tag Deactivation Station that does not Deactivate Tags" for details)

Three "Intelligent" or "Smart" Shelves

Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese (refrigerator shelf)
Procter & Gamble Pantene shampoo
Gillette Mach 3 Razor blades

(See "Part 3: Item-Level RFID Tagging" for details)

One Multimedia preview station

Customers can preview clips from DVD's and other media in a special preview station. The media station is activated by waving the RFID tag affixed to the media at a reader device.

Informational and Tag Reader Kiosk

There are two RFID reader kiosks in the METRO Future Store: one for information (pictured below), and one for so-called "deactivation" (described on our Deactivation Scandal page).

This picture shows the information kiosk located at the back of the store. It can display pre-programmed information about the four tagged products sold in the store and can also display the numerical identifier contained on each product's RFID tag.

METRO's Dr. Gerd Wolfram uses P&G Pantene shampoo to demonstrate the RFID tag reader and informational kiosk at the METRO Future Store. Katherine Albrecht of CASPIAN (front), Fernando Marcos of METRO, and a METRO employee look on.

When a customer holds a tagged product over the red "X", a pre-formatted information screen about the product appears on the screen. A customer can then navigate the touch-screen to view the information contained in the product's RFID tag.

The Information Contained in a Tag

The tag information displayed by the kiosk is numerical, and consists of two sets of numbers: the product barcode number, programmed by METRO at the warehous level, and the hard-coded chip ID number, programmed by chip maker Philips at the time of the tag's manufacture.

Backroom Reader

One of these RFID reader devices is located on either side of the corridors leading from the back storeroom onto the sales floor. These readers scan tagged items as employees bring them out of the warehouse to be placed on store shelves.

No RFID Readers at Checkout

METRO explained to us that none of the checkstands or cash registers in the Future Store contain RFID readers. Even the self-checkout station pictured below is "RFID-free," according to what we were told.

With the assistance of Metro executives, we performed a trial "Self-checkout" and even scanned the loyalty card of one of the METRO employees in our trial.

There was no mention made of the RFID tag hidden within the card.
(See "Scandal: RFID Tag Hidden in METRO's Loyalty Card" for more details on the hidden RFID tag.)

Shoppers must pass through one of these RFID reader gates in order to exit the store. The gates are presumably there to catch shoplifters (by reading the tags on passing cream cheese, shampoo, razor blades or DVD's). While these gates can read when a tagged product passes through them, they would not yet work to detect shoplifting, since the cash register does not scan the product's RFID number to record whether it has been sold and remove it from inventory. (Or at least so we've been told.)

What is more likely (but unconfirmed) is that the gates themselves serve to remove the products from inventory; i.e., as a shopper carries a bottle of Pantene shampoo through the gate, its number is probably captured and removed from METRO's inventory count.

Closeup of an RFID Gate positioned at a checkstand at the METRO Future Store. The English-language sign reads, "An RFID reading device has been installed to this gate."