Leave it to a chain drug store, where their most technically advanced item for purchase is a new 4 blade razor that vibrates, to be the first to do a large trial of RFID in store.  They are not going to track what you buy but what in store advertising you are exposed to.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has been around for awhile.  Your ability to buy a toll pass so you can just drive through toll booths is because of this and it has even found its way into the pet industry as a way of retreiving lost pets.  But Walgreens’ announcement that they have partnered with Goliath Solutions to use RFID tags as a way to track the location and effectiveness of Point-Of-Purchase displays in the stores is another step.  They will combine the data on the tags with scanner data to determine the effectiveness of the P-O-P in relation to sales.

Several groups have been worried that using RFID tagging with packaged goods was a little too “1984-like” (for those who were not forced to read this book in high school, it is about the government becoming big brother and watching everything you do).  If you have one of the loyalty cards from any store, they can already track your purchase behavior so it probably is not that big of an issue.  This however is an ingenius way of utlizing it to improve the success of marketing.  Spending a fair amount of my time looking into technologies like this, I’m only ticked that they were able to get there first.

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