Hospitality-services provider Delaware North announced the opening of a team merchandise store at Globe Life Field that uses Amazon’s RFID-based technology for cashier-free checkouts.
Called “Easy Out,” the newly opened stand at the Arlington, Texas-based home of MLB’s Texas Rangers uses RFID tags on clothing and other team merchandise to speed up the checkout procedure. According to Amazon and Delaware North, customers at the store simply choose what items they want, and then check out by exiting through gates where RFID readers scan the items; customers then either scan a credit card or use the Amazon One palm-based biometric payment system to check out.
The Globe Life Field store is the second store to use Amazon’s RFID checkout technology, following one that opened at Lumen Field in Seattle earlier this year.
Unlike Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” checkout-free concession stands, where customers enter payment information before entering a store, select their items and then exit without any other stops for transactions, the new merchandise stores do require customers to stop and “check out” by entering some kind of payment information and to allow the RFID systems to scan their items at the exit gates.
In that way, the RFID-based cashierless system is more comparable to other cashierless checkout options, like the Mashgin optical scanning systems or bar-code scanners from various providers. The idea behind most of these systems is that transactions are much faster by allowing customers to simply check themselves out instead of having to interact with a cashier who must perform checkouts manually.
Editor’s note: Taylor Soper at GeekWire has a good post with a video that shows how the RFID stores work in real life.
