I know that clothing stores items usually have some kind of RFID tags in them. But what about food items in grocery stores, say, a carton of milk? Are tags still embedded in them?
I’ve also read that scanning a barcode esentially deactivates the tag inside. But wouldn’t that mean that people can scan items and then not pay without setting the alarms off?
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Some shops use a form of magnetic sensor where the tagged item moving through the field induces an electric current in the sensor and sets off the alarm.
>But what about food items in grocery stores, say, a carton of milk? Are tags still embedded in them?
Generally speaking, no. It would be impractical to try and put those tags on grocery items. Moreover, it is more obvious when you steal from a grocery story – if you pass by the exit without paying it is pretty clear you did so; if you wear a pair of pants out of the store you didn’t pay for, it is much less obvious.
>I’ve also read that scanning a barcode essentially deactivates the tag inside
It depends on the system. If you have a serialized item, it can tell the system that monitors tags to ignore the tag for that specific item.
More commonly, though, when you pass it over the barcode scanner there is another system working in tandem that deactivates the tag.
The RFID tag is under a sticker. You can see a square loop of metal antenna against a light. Not all goods have them. Here alcoholic beverages and fish roe have reusable tags. Some goods might come with a tag from the factory. I’ve seen Philips lightbulbs have them. Some expensive goods are in a bigger box that the cashier opens.
Some expensive items like electronics have RFID tags, which can set off alarms if not deactivated. But for most food items, there are no embedded tags. Instead, stores rely on barcodes. Scanning a barcode doesn’t deactivate a tag, but alarms are triggered if someone tries to leave without paying, as the barcode needs to be properly scanned at the checkout.
This is ELI5, so, magnetic field at the door arches, when a theft sticker that hasn’t been demagnetized goes through the arches they react with a beep
Checkstands have a magnet by the scanner usually that will deactivate it temporarily
edit: also, some stores manually add the tags to stuff, some items come with them.
I’ll say that the grocery stores in my area have been doing this with meat for several years now. You put the sensor tags on anything that’s likely to be stolen, and abs of beef that are three times the price of five years ago are pretty likely to be stolen.
I work in a grocery store and there are no rfid tags at all.
We rely heavily on people to catch most of the theft. Cashiers are required to check in and under the cart, and are sent constant messages reminding them to do so. The loss prevention team is constantly watching the cameras for suspicious behavior, and we’ve recently upgraded the self checkout lanes with what they’re telling me is “AI”.
The really high theft items are kept at the customer service counter. You can’t just pick them up to scan with your regular groceries. You have to go to customer service and buy them. And we generally have an associate in every aisle. (Clearly I do not work at walmart)
Theft is still going to happen, but all of these things together are a good deterrent. There has been a major shift in how many people actually go to SCO (since the AI was added) vs a real cashier, and most of those are the honest people who “don’t like being recorded” (I hate to tell them, they were recorded from the minute they pulled into the parking lot).
Since the honest people aren’t using them, there’s less of a crowd for the thieves to blend into, so they stopped using them as well, and try to just get out the door without going anywhere near a register. This is what I’ve seen after only a few months using this system.
I do not know the numbers to know if actual theft has gone down, but overall business seems a lot slower in general, yet we’re still reaching our daily sales goals. So I have to assume it’s a good deterrent. It feels like it’s not an upgrade to me. It feels like… just close self checkout altogether and double up on cashiers. The only people using it now are the ones who are in a hurry and think they can get out faster than standing in line for a cashier. We’ve also been required to add more people to overlook SCO… and I’m thinking, “close them! get these people tills! this is stupid!!!!!!!”………….. but wtf do I know.
Generally it’s only high theft items that get tagged like that. I used to be the Asset Protection (Loss Prevention) guy at a Walmart and once a month I would have to look at what we were losing the most of in each department and adjust accordingly. The only “food” items that ever got tagged in my store was liquor. Electronics and cosmetics were always the highest theft items.
I work with these kinds of systems. The first thing you need to know is that security is sometimes just theatre. The door scanners, sometimes they are fake! Just intended to prevent shoplifting by making it look like you’ll get caught.
The next thing to understand is that there’s 2 basic kinds of RFID system. The first kind is super basic just radio frequency (or magnets). For these kinds of systems the tag needs to be removed, or phsycaly deactivated (normally by rubbing it against a magnet). You’ve likely seen the plastic tags on clothing, this is the kind that needs to get removed. You’ve likely had a clerk rub the sipie of a book against a special block, that’s a magnet deactivating the device in the spine of the book. This is how the old anti theft systems all worked up to about 10 years ago.
The new systems are actual RFID systems. Each RFID tag transmits a unique number, like 100% a unique number. If you have 2 large blue sweaters each one would transmit a different number.
These RFID tags are normally embedded into the actual paper of the price tag attached to the item for sale (so not common in grocery stores). In that kind of system the RFID tag never gets deactivated or removed, it’s kind of always active even when you take it home and throw it away. In that kind of system when the clerk sells an item, the POS knows the ID number and notes that specific item as sold. It’s not just scanning the tag that does this, it won’t happen until you actually complete the full transaction.
Every person that leaves the store passes through the gates (or under the reader) and the RFID tag is read, compared against the database of items in the store and if the item has been sold, no alarm sounds. But if the item is not listed as sold, an alarm goes off.
The new systems are better for lots of reasons but in terms of anti theft it’s because you know what was actually stolen. In the old kind of RF system the alarm would go off the the thief ran away and you’d have no clue what they actually took just that an active tag left the store. But the new RFID systems are significantly more expensive, buying the paper price tags with the RFID chips in them is expensive, buying the machines that print the tags is expensive and the readers in the stores are more expensive. But much better inventory control.
> I know that clothing stores items usually have some kind of RFID tags in them. But what about food items in grocery stores, say, a carton of milk? Are tags still embedded in them?
For the most part, grocery stores don’t have anti-theft tags on/in their items. So, when there’s a detector at the door, it’s just for show.
> I’ve also read that scanning a barcode esentially deactivates the tag inside. But wouldn’t that mean that people can scan items and then not pay without setting the alarms off?
Whoever wrote that scanning a barcode deactivates the anti-theft tag was pants-on-head wrong.
A barcode exists for the sole purpose of identifying the product in store databases. It has nothing to do with the anti-theft tags.
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