Printed RFID - they said ten years ago if the cost could get to 5 cents at the item level it would pay for itself - not even considering theft.
Didn’t Amazon try this in some of their grocery stores? Everything is radio tagged. Just put items in your bags/cart and walk out. Automatically charges your card. No scanning, no clerk. I am not sure of the details they employed but technically it could work. Maybe you have to swipe your card but all the “work” of checking out is done by radio frequency. If I recall Amazon wanted fingerprints but that’s unnecessary. RFID could do almost all the checkout and you just pay. No waiting.
I was at Home Depot the other day, happened to be in the same center and needed some radiator coolant. I was headed to the self checkout and a woman checker clerk flagged me down. I told her I was glad she did that, job security. If corporate sees a checker only doing a small number of receipts they are likely to eliminate her job or scale back her hours. But it’s a losing battle. It is heading towards automation.
I was in the grocery store, a young kid was clearly new on the job. I teased him about having to scan the fruit and vegetables. I told him back in the day checkers needed to know all the fruits and veggies, or had a big book to look it up - and had to wring up the price by hand. An “old timer” heard me and said “we’ve still got that book around here somewhere”.
One of my co-workers invented a laser barcode scanner that worked beautifully with printed barcodes...even moving around in 3D space. A great concept and implementation, but it lost out to RFID that could be scanned even when optically obscured.