The script is flipped as Tony D'Onofrio interviews Mike Graen on opportunities of RFID at retail in this final part of their interview together. Topics of discussion include:

♻️ Sustainability

🏷️ Importance of tagging

🛍️ Collaboration with retailers

Greetings, my name is Mike Graen. Welcome to

another Walton supply chain Center Edition of on shelf

availability. Today we flip the script a little bit. And Tony

D'onofrio actually interviews me about the opportunity if RFID at

retail. Let's go ahead and join in his progress.

Tony D'onofrio: And I agree with that that comes up this further.

Let's keep going because we got a lot to go. We also have a lot

of questions, I will get to somebody's question. So I really

appreciate the audience engagement. So this is actually

one of your charts in terms of interesting tidbits in terms of

stats. So can you highlight the ones that are important to you?

Yeah, so my perspective of this, this goes

back to kind of the, the comment I made before, which is, you

know, people are noticing that product continues to have on

shelf availability issues, whether it's canned foods, or

toiletries, etc. These items are important items for the customer

to have things delivered to their home, and or to the pickup

in store. This next one is pretty interesting, because what

it's saying is, without sending, actually sending the message to

a shopper, your availability gives them an indication of

whether they're going to come back and shop this, this limited

love loyalty, I think is pretty important. We've all gone into a

store before. And the thing has just been demolished. It is out

of stocks everywhere. There's trash everywhere, etc. You can

put up with that once or twice. But if that's a consistent

behavior, you're probably going to go plus somewhere else.

Because if that's the way they run the store, that's not good.

So 80% of shoppers have noticed that shelves are out of stock or

low stock than usual than a year ago. So shoppers are making

those determinations. And now what's happening, what's

fascinating is you have retailers who normally were

responsible for stocking the shelves and taking the customer

money. In a lot of scenarios. They're adding a third leg to

their platform, which is shopping on behalf of customers.

So you're having the retailer actually do the shopping and

simulating what it feels like for a customer and they're

complaining the stuff is out of stock all the time. So

interesting transition bottom bottom line is this certainly

goes back to Sam Walton's quote, you know, at the end of the day

you disappoint a customer, they're gonna go somewhere else.

Tony D'onofrio: And so that's totally correct. Well, I'm gonna

quickly want you to answer a couple of the questions. We're

getting a lot of questions. So one of them is does that

sustainability? How does that fit help with sustainability?

You take reducing waste and supporting the sustainability

efforts?

Yeah, I think there's a couple actually, some

people would argue RFID goes against sustainability, right?

Because you're putting an actual RFID tag on product that quote

doesn't make it sustainable anymore. Now, I am not a

recycling expert by any stretch of the imagination. But as I

talked to my friends at Avery Dennison, they said, one of the

things that happens when something like a piece of

cardboard gets recycled, is they end up turning that paper into

more of a slurry or a slash and the metal kind of falls to the

bottom. So there is a recyclability component to that.

Here's the other thing, I think we need to kind of think outside

the box if you actually RFID individual selling units. I

wonder if RFID could be used just thinking outside the box in

the landfills to find out how much of that product is coming

in, that potentially could have been recycled, and it really got

thrown away. So instead of thinking about it as a negative,

let's think about it as can we leverage RFID even things like

landfills to figure out what percentage of the stuff is being

thrown away versus recycled?

Tony D'onofrio: Yeah, and I think you can also track you

know, point of origin, you can also track in terms of what

happens to it through the supply chain, you have to make sure it

gets sold at the right time. So in other words, making sure the

right products and on the shelf sooner, so you can sell them and

you're not actually thrown away. So there's all kinds of other

ways that I think RFID can getting cut down in the wastage.

the food area to me, there's a untapped potential in

the food area when you start thinking about how much food

gets tossed in unfortunately, let's go back to the personnel

we call it personnel issues. Sometimes personnel issues are

Hey, we didn't go through today and actually go through all of

our bread to make sure that we put some of this that was made a

couple days ago on a reduced for quick sale rack. So instead of

doing a mark ban where we take a little bit of loss, we ended up

having to throw it away well throwing away food is not a big

idea, right? That's a bad idea. So if we can start to leverage

RFID, because RFID has not only will get, you know, we'll talk

about probably this later RFID gets you ability to says not

only that is that this is UPC, but I know exactly when this

product was delivered, or were created or baked or whatever it

happens to be. Add four days to it, that's when I need to mark

it down, add two more days to it. That's what I needed throw

it away. So I can start to reduce and mark down things

rather than throwing away and to me that's, that's a big idea

from from a food waste perspective.

Tony D'onofrio: Let me ask the other questions, because it'll

be in the retailer actually clarify. They will look to

Coworth we're gonna get to some places like basically so stag in

some of these high tech items, like golf and cold and allergy,

have a scare some of these products that are being stolen?

Can we get to sort of stay in and how, though, actually get

that started as a process? Is what they were actually asking.

Not the pharmacy, not to pharmaceutical?

Yeah. And that's a? That's a great question.

Unfortunately, every time he asked a question, he ended up

pointing back to yourself, because the only ones that do

the programs that I've seen that are more successful, the most

successful is when a retailer decides they're going to

implement RFID. And their expectation with their

suppliers, it's tagged at source, it gets tagged at the

source when it gets manufactured. If you try and tag

it at a distribution center, or even worse, in a store, you can

do it for a while. But it becomes very, very, very, very

challenging to make sure everything's tagged correctly.

So supplier, we talk about the success model of RFID. And

apparel, let's talk about a couple things. Number one, for

the most part, it's tagged at store source, forget the

vertical subs for a second. But for people like Walmart, and

Dick's Sporting Goods and Nordstroms at Target, their

expectation is suppliers, we expect you to tag it at source,

we expect it to be sourced tagged all the way through the

supply chain, and we start taking advantage of that post

tags there. So back to the retailer, whoever asked that

question, it's not a quick fix. But here's the deal. If you

think cough cold should be RFID tagged, and you want to be able

to leverage that, you got to start engaging with your

suppliers Now, make a decision. First off, get a sponsor, who's

going to drive this from a business standpoint at your

retail organizations high enough to its operations and

merchandising. Number two, decide you're going to leverage

RFID for the purpose of knowing what you have and where it's

located. Number three, come up with a source tagging plan and

communicate that to your suppliers and hold them

accountable to that. And then while that's her product is

getting source tag, and it's coming through the supply chain,

you're standing up your RFID solution to take advantage of

those times when it hits the store. That would be my

recommendation. People aren't going to just start source

tagging it just because they're going to source tag it because

somebody said, this is an expectation I have of doing

business with us. I would also say as crazy as this sounds,

Tony, major retailers who are direct competitors need to

collaborate and make recommendations on categories.

Hear your smile like oh, I want support. Let's just open up

Tony D'onofrio: No, no, no, you're totally correct. You are

totally correct.

I think it's okay just to call this out. Walmart,

and target and CVS and Walgreens. If you all get

together and go, Hey, we all want to do cough cold, let's

just call out cough cold with RFID. Walmart doing saying it

versus targeted senator that becomes kind of a well, you

know, they're asking for and they're not. So if I'm a if I'm

a cough, cold, we go well, I'll tag some of this stuff,

etcetera, to drive substantial change in the industry. If you

all get together go, we're all going to ask for this over the

next couple of years. Why don't you go ahead and tag it all,

because then the suppliers can start leveraging number one,

they don't have to have, well, this SKU is tagged and this one

isn't. So I'll create a different SKU for it. They can

tag it, or they can start leveraging RFID in their own

facility. So if the retailer's in and this idea of

collaborating across retailers sounds like it's an antitrust

violation, it's not it's just setting expectations, saying,

we're all going to look for the same thing. So if you're gonna

start doing tagging for a retailer, then tag it all,

because eventually all the retailers going to take a look,

Tony D'onofrio: You nailed it. That's exactly it. It starts

though you've

with the retailer. And then from there, you work through the

rest. But let's keep going because I want to do want to get

to those use cases. And all that and we're going to run out of

time. I'm going to quickly stay on this chart because they're

asking a lot of good question. This chart is actually one

online and what it shows it Prime members, Amazon Prime

members for soldiers a lot of there's 200 plus million of

them, and they're primed to actually switch immediately. If

you're honest. That's number one. Some that chart the other

thing that's on this chart, it says, Who do you trust, they

actually have it in stock. The highest swap is not an a

retailer, it's an Amazon. So that gives you an idea how

important it is for retail to actually get there in stock

under control. So that's my comment. What do you think?

Yeah, well, I've

got a, I've got a different slide from eihl that I

typically quote, it's a little bit different this, which is,

this is pretty amazing. Amazon Prime customers, when face and

out of stocks are 73% more likely to use their own phone to

doorstop. Here's the other 24% of all of Amazon's current, I'm

sorry, 25% of Amazon's current revenue comes from customers who

tried to buy it in the store first. And know that that's a

sound buy for you. Here's what's amazing soundbite here's what

Amazon's got. They don't have customers coming in and taking

product and putting into the other side of the store so

nobody can find it. They don't have organized retail crime,

people going into their warehouses and stealing stuff.

They don't have customers stealing stuff. They don't have

associates or employees stealing stuff, right? They don't have

for the most part, they do a pretty good job of making sure

they get, you know, get paid for everything they received the

distribution center walk, so Amazon doesn't have a what do I

have? And where is it located. I've never done an out of stock

study, or a on hand accuracy study, which is the term that we

typically look at. My guess is in an Amazon fulfillment center,

your on hand accuracy is pretty good. You know what you have,

and you know what's located, you open it up to a retail store

where you have 1000s of people running around the store all the

time and knows where your stuff's going to show up. So by

definition, Amazon's going to be better. Here's what I would

argue, I would argue that customers want to be able to

support businesses near them. And if I've got, and I'm just

going to, to Walmart's horn a little bit, if 90% or 95% of the

US population is within 10 miles of a Walmart store. And I can

get something in an hour versus a day or two from Amazon. I'm

going with that. Right. So I like I like the people who are

omni channel who have both brick and mortar locations as well as

omni channel. I like their their ability to be able to win in the

future. But Amazon is clearly taking market share from a lot

of brick and mortar retailers, because they don't know what

they have. And they know where it's located. That's where

Amazon's gonna win.

Tony D'onofrio: And that's, again brings back exactly your

full point about how important I shop ability is. So let me keep

going again, this is actually again from you. So tell me what

this is telling you.

Yeah, I've got kind of mentioned this one already a

couple times. Because Because knowing what you have and where

it's located. without human intervention, that means

nobody's scanning stuff. And nobody knew in audits and nobody

taking the gun are personnel are valuable resources in a store,

they should be there to take care of the customer. They

shouldn't be there to scan stuff to one stuff, I understand that

that's a part of the right expectation. But this is a B is

a big idea. Can you tell me what you have in the store? Where is

it located without human intervention without somebody

scanning and wandering and doing all this other kind of work?

That to me is going to be a disruptor in the retail

industry, if I can literally virtually lift the lid off a

store and look down and go, Hey, I'm looking for this particular

printer cartridge. Oh, I've got two here, three here and one

here without somebody going and scanning it. That's a game

changer. And we've got to figure out how to get there. Because

what we also want to do is expose those on hands to

customers to go, No, I have three of them. They're right

here, I know exactly where they're located. Today,

retailers hide inventory from customers, because they're not

sure if they really have three. So I don't want to tell them

three and then disappointed them. They hide that inventory.

Dr. Hargrave calls that one just hiding inventory. That's because

I don't want to disappoint a customer. Well, if I know

exactly what I have and where it's located, without a human

being having to go look, that's a disruptor in the retail

industry. And I think it's a big opportunity.

Tony D'onofrio: Totally agree. Let me keep going again, just to

make sure we covered some so retailer adoption seems to be

increasing. So general trends at church seeing another some logos

on here, but general trends that you're seeing in terms of the

adoption rate

from from each one of these retailers have publicly

communicated that they are leveraging radio frequency

identification as the ability as one of the tools to be able to

understand what they have and where it's located. And I don't

think that trend is going to change. I think it's going to

continue to grow to our conversation earlier I think

other categories beyond apparel, these are all for the most part.

focusing on apparel, I think things like home and general

merchandise and electronics and sporting goods, those are all

coming down the road. So if you're in any of those general

merchandise categories, you might as well figure out what

RFID is because you're gonna eventually be asked by one of

your retail partners to put RFID tags on a product. I don't think

there's any definite question about that.

Tony D'onofrio: Anyway, let's let's move on to the this is

actually talking to the actual adoption rates. And this is one

of your charts. So you will want to talk to this one.

Well, it's I want to I charts is one of Auburn RFID

charts is Justin Patton's chart. But this was shown at RFID

journal this year. Obviously, you can see the growth from

2018, with 14 billion to 45 billion in 2023. It's growing

outside of just retail as well, this chart was actually given by

the folks from UPS, which are fully leveraging RFID for

package tracking inside their supply chain. Again, that's

public knowledge. So I'm not sharing anything that I

shouldn't be sharing, but they are clearly leveraging that. It

basically you want to be able to tell what you have and where

it's located, even the package industry, I think 45 billion is

probably a pretty good estimate. And I would expect that 2024,

beyond the numbers are going to continue to grow. I don't think

there's any question about that.

Tony D'onofrio: I agree. And in fact, that next chart talks

exactly about the same thing into the adoption rate

increasing. And you can see when he does what's what's optimistic

on here that points to the other questions, is actually in the

bottom right. What it's saying is that a barrel was the major

driver at 22. But if you look at even Avery Dennison pipeline in

23, and beyond, it's actually well beyond just a barrel. So

it's going into much broader categories, which told you that

the retailer asked the question about some of the other

categories, it is happening. But ultimately, it's got to be

driven by the retailer. So I don't know if you want to make

any shortcomings because I want to get to the use case. Topic.

Yeah, so So here's the other thing that a retailer

can help with, collaborating with other retailers and say we

want to go this way with RFID. Let me give you an example.

Right now. We know how to do RFID. For a pair of socks,

apparel, we know how to do it for shoes, we know how to do it

for electronics, you start getting into categories like

beauty, specifically, cosmetics, fragrances, etc. Lots of

challenges very small product very, very, aesthetically has to

be a statically pleasing. I cut I can't just slap a big ol RFID

tag on a thing, lipstick and louder be aesthetically

pleasing. So there's some r&d that has to be happening on the

front end of this with some of the tag suppliers and in the

packaging folks to figure out how do you make this work, but

it actually not destroy the professionalism and the artwork,

etc. So here's the deal. Don't just decide, hey, tomorrow,

we're gonna do RFID for cosmetics. Let's go and work

with the industry now and tell the Avery Dennison's of the

world and folks like that, that, hey, we're calling this way,

they probably already know it. But when you start to get a lot

of retailers go, we want to go this way for cosmetics. We want

to have that work done before the astor's even occurred. And

that that, to me is the importance of work in this

industry. Because here's the deal, what a supplier like Max

Factor puts an RFID tag, it has to be aesthetically pleasing. It

has to work. And by the way, I want to do it one way for all my

retailers leveraging GS one standards and Auburn standards,

I can't have a different way to do it for Walmart versus target,

etcetera, it's got to be one way to make it easier for adoption.

But to me, that's what's going to be really the issue right

now. To me, there's a challenge with just the aesthetics and the

ability to make a tag small enough that it actually reads

and works effectively. So

Tony D'onofrio: we need to work. Yeah, I totally agree. Because

the branding folks are going to be done the biggest barrier to

actually getting anything done in their store, if you totally

destroy that beautiful packaging that they design. Exactly. It's

not likely Cosmetics is a no brainer for me. You want to talk

about something that's hard to know, what do you have and where

is it located.

And a customer who is going to go in and go I'm not

I don't want that shade. I want this shade and you don't have

that shade. I don't care how many 1000 shades you got if you

don't have the one that my wife's looking for, you know,

your auto stocks, or from amazon so that he had an opportunity in

the cosmetics, by the way for the for sharing as well.

Tony D'onofrio: So this is another chart that talks about

counterfeiting data and with this

Yeah, but go to the next one too, because this 2017

was a small number now it's gotten bigger. So

Tony D'onofrio: yeah, this actually was one of the

question. That's why I wanted to include it. That's actually one

of the questions I came in.

All the things that we've talked about so far have

been and knowing what I have inside a physical store and

knowing where it's located RFID does a really, really good job

of doing that. As we start to think about other UK, so

remember, we said we're going to tag it at source. So when it's

manufactured, we're going to tag it. One of the things that

retailers and suppliers have, and I'm just going to pick on

this bottom number here claims. Tony, I ordered 52 of something

from you, and I only got 20. Okay, so I'm going to create a

claim against you. And your answer is based upon us, we sent

you all 50. While I only got 20, well, I sent you 50. And we play

this game back and forth, back and forth, right? We have no

data, other than to say, I said, I shipped it, why didn't get it?

Bad. So that's about the only thing you got. If you start

leveraging RFID. I go, Okay, you asked for 50. Here are the 50,

what I'm going to call serialized numbers, and I'm

putting in a case that's going to you. And when you get them if

you don't get all 50, that I can prove to you that when they left

my facility, they're all 50. Were there. If you only got 20,

then let's go chalk to whoever transported it because they

probably took some of them out. Right? It puts accountability

again, without somebody sitting there scanning everything and

auditing things. It allows us to be able to leverage did I

actually get what I paid for and the argument goes away. So

claims are a huge opportunity, counterfeiting people like Nike

spend millions of dollars billions of dollars on that Nike

swoosh, it's not hard to rip off that Nike swoosh and send a

whole bunch of stuff into a retailer go, what's his Nike

product, but I'm gonna sell it for half the cost? Well, wait a

minute, now you're creating a negative situation for Nike,

where you're selling my brand at less than half the cost? It's

because it's counterfeit. So whether it's pharmaceuticals or

brand branded items like Nike, I can now tell you these are the

serialized numbers have every single Nike item, if you're get

selling Nike stuff, that's not one of these serial numbers,

it's counterfeit, do something about it, right? It gives you

the ability to track that and including, did I really get the

right pharmaceuticals that I get the right prescription, etc.

Counterfeiting and claims have a huge opportunity. And then we're

I'm sure we're going to talk about shrink share in a second

in a retail store. But to me, these are updated numbers, these

are big, big numbers, that we have the potential with RFID to

be able to provide the visibility, we need to be able

to have that awareness.

Tony D'onofrio: It can be let me keep going here just to make

sure we so use gates is one of my favorite charts. Let's talk

about use cases, I'm gonna let you tackle it first. But boy,

I was I'm going to talk fast. So where most

retailers start is the bottom of the triangle. If I improve my on

hand accuracy, and aka know what I have no words located, I

should be able to have the product available for the

customers, I should be able to increase sales. I don't think a

2% increase in sales is out of the question for anybody. Matter

of fact, sidenote, Auburn University and I are actually

doing a research project with three universities to measure on

hand accuracy, and its impact on sales. And buy line pickup and

store and inventory levels. We're going to execute that and

2024 more to follow there. But it's going to come out of the

Auburn University. People want to know if I get if I moved from

enhanced accuracy from 50% to 95%. What kind of sales lift do

I get? What kind of online impact do I have? So that's

that's the base of the triangle where everybody starts, I think

the next set of use cases and I'll put it a shameless plug

because I'd have my good friend Joe Cole from Macy's is going to

be joining me on an upcoming podcast, leveraging RFID for the

purpose of asset protection, knowing exactly what you got,

did I get everything I paid for when we were receiving

standpoint, and did things leave the store that got paid for or

did things more importantly, leaves the store that didn't get

paid for? To me and this, this will be interesting given given

the folks at people like Sensormatic they've

traditionally use electronic article surveillance to do that

great technology, it's going to be around for a while. But that

all it does is say something's leaving the building didn't get

paid for RFID allows me to know exactly what the left of the

store when it left the store and exactly what was in that

particular store. And then we could talk about asset

protection for a long time to be asset protection is a big issue

right now in the industry more than ever. RFID has the ability

to give the information that people need to know where is

this leading if you will come from we've already talked about

elimination of food waste. We already mentioned that with the

markdowns. claims reduction, I kind of walked you through that

with the whole, you send me 25 And I expected 50, etc. The

other two here are backroom picking, people are going to

start to get and we'll flip to the next slide here in a second,

people are going to start to look at other use cases beyond

just is my inventory accurate in that's going to require a

potentially fixed infection infrastructure to do that. And

the last one is supplier insights, they're spending 25

years as a PNG, I can tell, all I can see is how much I shipped

to you, or how much I sell, I can't see where it's selling

from RFID. And fix infrastructure allows me to know

exactly where the products being sold from, I have a lot of other

information that I believe suppliers would be willing to

thought to help monetize and take advantage of us to really

understand where their stuff is selling from.

Tony D'onofrio: Yeah, good point. And we're not gonna make

these charts available to the audience. I just want to quickly

say that the last event just base just to reinforce it RFID

came out of number one technology in the latest NRF

shrink survey. So it is tough on mind. And some retailers are

doing a really good job. And again, we're going to make these

charts available. But I want to make sure we get to this,

because in terms of the variety of ways, they you can actually

apply RFID. So go ahead, Michael, what's your thoughts on

this?

Yeah, and I will take you through all of these

areas, things they it relates back to that triangle slide, as

I said before, so if all you want to do is measure on hand

accuracy and on shelf availability and mark down the

data capture, so there's two parts of RFID. There's the tag

itself. And then there's the data capture, which is how do

you how do you read those tags, if you do a cycle count once a

week, once every two weeks, once a day doesn't matter. The things

you could do with it are basically in the top left hand

corner, which is on a inaccuracy, fill raid markdowns

and potentially eliminating the annual inventory as you do, as

you start leveraging it for backroom that back house, the

front of house replenishment, real time updates, location,

accuracy, asset tracking, shrink reporting, etc, you start to

have to do some thing that looks like a minimal viable product

that looks like some fixed infrastructures at the back of

the store, transition to the sales floor and the eggs of the

store. And this thing over on the right hand side next to this

fixed reader is basically a robot, there's an opportunity to

have robotics. There's a company out there, like badger robotics

that actually has our robotics scan the shelf, they can have

RFID readers on them as well. So you don't have to give somebody

a one and manually collected. And then you get all the way

over here to do I would say is the full fixed infrastructure

where it's continuously reading all the time. And there's a lot

more things you can do it in terms of real time updates,

location, accuracy, real time, electronic proof of delivery,

and some other things like that, again, Tony, that we can take

this is probably a podcast by itself to go through all this. I

agree. I don't want to try and minimize it. But you have to

understand your business case, which is that triangle, and then

say, Okay, I'm gonna get into this business, what's the data

capture? Most people do a one first, which is great. But if

you want to leverage some of the asset protection and real time

continuous monitoring, you got to invest in infrastructure

that's beyond a one.

Tony D'onofrio: I totally agree. And in fact, there are some

retailers already moving towards the full infrastructure. But it

was a journey. It wasn't a you start at different places and

ended up in different places, depending on where you're at on

your journey. So let me go to this slide, which are some

important additional thoughts that I want you to start

wrapping us up with.

Yeah so let me let me wrap it up with a couple of

things. And this can sound a little bit confusing, but I

think it's important to cover number one. If we have already

talked about if you're a retailer, that's an apparel

retailer or a sporting retailer, I can see a day where 100% of

your business is going to be RFID. No question about it. If

you're a club or a mass merchandiser, like a Walmart or

Target, you're going to have to come up with different sensor

signals that are going to be able to tell you what do I have

and where is it located. Some of your products will be RFID.

Great. Some of them will have to require computer vision. Some of

it will be 2d barcode, some of it will be digimarc. Some of it

will be Bluetooth. I'm not not to try go into details, but each

item is going to have to have a different sensor that said they

all feed into ability to say what do I have and where is it

located? Number two serialization. RFIDs premise is

a UPC and a unique serial number. And Tony you and I well

know we've been around retail long enough that UPC quantity

has always been what it is. So it's a G 10 or the UPC. I've got

five of them well with serialization, which is part of

RFID but it doesn't have to be RFID. Sunrise 2027 is going to

give you a new platform where every retailer is going to be

able to scan a 2d barcode which gives you a lot more

information. So I think about serialization that means a UPC

and a unique number, almost like the VIN number, your car is

unique to that selling item, which the exact same item below

it same. UPC has a different VIN number. So serialization or

serialized G tins are going to be the future. People who are

not familiar with that content need to understand sunrise 2027,

which is part of GS one. And the only other two are just hey, we

talk a lot about this kind of stuff on the on shelf,

availability.com platform and conversations on retail. Stay up

to speed of this, put it as part of your podcast, because there's

stuff coming all the time that I think it's important for the

retailers and the suppliers community to understand.

Tony D'onofrio: So excellent, excellent. webinar. Mike, you

did an excellent job being on the other side of the

microphone. So congratulations. So you're going to have to give

me that test at some point. So we'll have to alternate and do

this. But it's been a pleasure. I know that. There are some

questions. Let me ask real quick and we got a minute. So

absolutely. Any new innovation that excites you in RFID right

now? Any unique

Well, here's the deal. RFID has been the same

since we put the first tag on a you know, World War two plane,

right. I mean, it's been the site. What's interesting is two

things. Number one, I think it's interesting that we have other

use cases other than what do I have? And where is it located?

That to me is that that triangle is is interesting, because we've

always asked for it to be supplier sourced time. Now, with

claims and some of these other things, I think we will

definitely see the value of doing it upstream, number one,

number two and shameless plug for Auburn. We're seeing it in

other verticals as well. So things like aircraft, for those

of you who are potentially going to go to the RFID board meeting

coming up here in September, we're going to have hosted at

Cape Canaveral, NASA uses RFID a lot, where we're seeing it and

food service industry, McDonald's is using it for

things. So what's interesting is the technology hasn't

fundamentally change. People are just coming up with more and

more use cases beyond just you know, you know, toll roads and

car washes, they're using it for other things, and it's really

starting to make an impact to the industry.

Tony D'onofrio: Well, excellent. Well, thank you very much to the

entire audience of we appreciate the look for the replay for the

ones that were not able. We do have a big retail event coming

up October 18. Look for that in my social media channel. We got

people on there from around the world that will speak about the

future of retail. And with that signing off. Thank you all.

Thank you, Mike.

Yep. Have a great day, everybody. Well, I hope you

enjoyed that conversation with Tony D'onofrio, and I join us

next time as we get back into the RFID. But this time we talk

to a retailer, we get a chance to talk to Joe Cole, who's the

vice president of asset protection at Macy's about how

he's leveraging RFID in the Macy's Corporation. He'll be

joined by Randy Dunn of the zebra Corporation. Look forward

to talking to you then