Issue 12.07 - July 2004 Subscribe to WIRED magazine and receive a FREE gift!

I'm in a supermarket called the Extra Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany, 40 kilometers north of Düsseldorf, jonesing for a bit of Philadelphia cream cheese. I feed my request into the touchscreen console on my shopping cart, and up pops a map showing the optimal path to the dairy section. I steer over and grab a box - regular in name but far smarter than the average cream cheese. The package carries a computer chip that talks to a 2-millimeter-thin pad lining the shelf under the box. When I pick up the cheese, sensors in the pad notify the store's database that the box has been removed. I exchange the plain for the mit Kräuter (with herbs) then, wracked with indecision, snag the low-fat version. It turns out it's not really all that low-fat anyhow, so I put it back down. My waffling will produce a flurry of data back at Kraft Foods headquarters. The company, which gets this information in return for subsidizing the smart shelf and the microchips attached to the packages, will use the data to analyze my behavior. The marketing department will likely draw some kind of conclusion from my skittishness - a hint that maybe "low-fatness" is too Spartan a theme for a hedonistic schmear anyway. Of course, they'll also have serious insight into my personal shopping habits.

My companion is a sloe-eyed, dark-haired young woman named Silke Michel, who holds one of the world's rarer jobs: supermarket tour guide. More than 10,000 people have visited the Future Store in the past year - not including the real live shoppers of Rheinberg, who have become adept at maneuvering their carts around herds of pinstriped looky-loos. The visitors come from all over the world for a preview of the global retail experience, circa 2013. The star of the show is the radio frequency identification chip - a piece of circuitry about the size of a grain of sand. Thanks to the coordinated efforts of the world's biggest retailers and manufacturers, not to mention the persistence of former lipstick marketer Kevin Ashton, these little tags are about to infiltrate the world of commerce.

Depending who you ask, RFID tags constitute

1. the best thing to happen to manufacturing since the cog.

2. the biggest threat to personal privacy since the crowbar.

3. the near-exact fulfillment of the Book of Revelation's description of the mark of the beast.

There's a compelling argument for each of these perspectives - including number three.

European retailer Metro built the Future Store to be the premier live testing ground for RFID tags, and the world's biggest consumer goods manufacturers are lining up to have a gander. Gillette, Kraft, and Procter & Gamble are among the companies banking on RFID chips to track each cream cheese container, razor blade, and bottle of shampoo. They know precisely which package occupies what bit of shelf space and how long it takes the Future Store's staff to replace a purchased item.

Retailers are even keener to get their hands on the sort of information RFID tags promise to reveal. The way it works now, all the little kinks along the supply chain accumulate in the lap of retailers, which take delivery of products without knowing whether the shipments are correct until they're unpacked. The average rate for shipping screwups is 1 in 20. That's a big part of why margins in the retailing business are so thin - average net profit for supermarkets is 1 percent - and precisely the reason that Wal-Mart, Target, and Metro have given their top suppliers six to nine months to start slapping RFID tags onto crates and delivery pallets. Manufacturers want this technology, but retailers need it.

When talking to people in the RFID business, you hear a lot about Fortune One, aka Wal-Mart, the top company on the Fortune 100, which rose to power by understanding the supply chain better than any of its competitors. The pitch RFID vendors make to retailers boils down to this: You, too, can take control of your supply chain. You can be like Wal-Mart. You can save millions - billions! - of dollars. The Future Store stockroom serves as the model. Michel points to a reader at the entrance to the loading dock that logs the arrival of any RFID-tagged contents, all but eliminating foul-ups.

Back in the aisles, antennas suspended from the ceiling track our position, and a server beams information about specials to our cart's console. The prices on the 35,000 remote-controlled LCD labels flickering on the shelves rise or fall each night with inventory levels. Throw that 10-pack of juice boxes into the cart when there are still two pallets in the back room and it could cost you 1.99 euros. But show up after a Saturday afternoon rush and you'd be looking at 2.53 euros.

After choosing a bottle of Pantene shampoo (P&G will be interested to know that I opted for the glatt und seidig variety only after picking up a different bottle first), we make our way to the DVD section. Michel picks Verrückt nach Mary off the shelf, the German-dubbed version of There's Something About Mary, and holds the RFID-tagged package up to a video kiosk. The movie's trailer starts, and we share a chuckle as Cameron Diaz answers the door sporting a hairstyle product not sold in stores.

As a rule, I loathe going to the supermarket. But this is actually fun - like a multimedia scavenger hunt. It's as though the store is reaching out to help me, entertain me, and, yes, take my money. Ultimately, the store hopes to have every item tagged. Until then, it boasts several futuristic features that use barcodes as temporary stand-ins for RFID. A produce kiosk equipped with a digicam and identification software prints price stickers for fruits and veggies based on size, color, and shape; a sommelier kiosk regards a bottle of wine, tells me the appellation, suggests accompanying dishes, and compares vintages. Best of all, once the store becomes RFID-saturated, I'll be able to breeze out to my car without breaking stride - a scanner will read the tags in my cart and debit my bank account, just like a shopping-floor E-ZPass. I just hope the bag boy can keep up.