Picture this: after school, your kids come home and ravage the pantry. Detecting the now-empty cupboards, your home’s electronic inventory assistant emails you an urgent shopping list: pick up more Cheez-Its, Cap’n Crunch, orange juice, milk, eggs, and Eggo waffles.
Picture this: after school, your kids come home and ravage the pantry. Detecting the now-empty cupboards, your home’s electronic inventory assistant emails you an urgent shopping list: pick up more Cheez-Its, Cap’n Crunch, orange juice, milk, eggs, and Eggo waffles.
On the way home, you stop by your local supermarket, and the otherwise solo trip up and down the aisles is accompanied by oddly soothing promotional jingles personalized just for you. Mindful of the time, you careen through the store, piling items into your cart before dashing out the sliding doors and darting through late afternoon traffic to make it home just in time for The Simpsons.
Figure One: The Magellan STRP-5050 StackTag Tunnel Reader
While fast, convenient, and simple for you, your casual trip to the store has triggered a much larger chain of events, albeit unbeknownst to you:
* Upon entering the store, your customer profile was retrieved from a database and cross-referenced with the shopping list sent along earlier that day.
* As you dashed each item from your shopping list, electronic records of store inventories were immediately adjusted, providing the store’s management, regional warehouse, and even the chain’s CEO with product availability information in real-time.
* Low supplies automatically initiated a re-order and scheduled shipments to the local store.
* Leaving the store,…
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