116K views · Jul 22, 2013 · 1:02 · 1 HN recommender · 3 mentions · discussed 2020–2024
A 2006 IBM commercial depicting a future supermarket where shoppers walk out and RFID automatically charges them for their items.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN commenters cite it as proof that walk-out shopping was envisioned long before Amazon's version, and as an appealing vision of the future.
“IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006.”HN comment, 2020
“so "I want to live in this world" that became one of my favorites even today”
IBM's 2006 self-checkout ad envisioned a cool future.
Back in 2006 IBM already had predicted how self- checkout should work[1]. Their TV ad made was so cool, so well done and so "I want to live in this world" that became one of my favorites even today: this video [1] link
“IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006.”
2006 IBM ad shows walk-out shopping tech long before Amazon.
IBM viewed this tech seriously enough to be marketing it to the public in 2006. It wasn't a "Hey, we're making this." ad but more of an, "We're cool because we're working on this, sorta maybe." ad. this video 14 years later, it's still vaporware. There are a lot of fairly tough problems that need to be solved to make it work. Today, Amazon is probably better positioned to sucker/bully retailers into adopting their solution than IBM is. It remains to be seen if they can actually pull off the tech side of things though. IBM is not a company that's easy to laugh at.
IBM ad of walking out of store with auto-charged items.
Worth the read just for the context around "A much larger problem with RFID than its satanic origins remains the cost of tags" alone. I remember ads from IBM about 20 years ago where a guy walks out of a store with several items looking all shopliftery but cuts to an IBM-logo'd terminal where magic EAS tags have charged his credit card automatically. Edit: this video
