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Ice Cream Shop Uses RFID To Broadcast Latest Inventory

Written by Evan Schuman
May 13th, 2010
At Izzy's Ice Cream Café in Saint Paul, Minn., a teenage scooper has just dished up the last of the strawberry cheesecake ice cream. When she pulls out the RFID-tagged strawberry label and replaces it with one for lemon custard, a colored dot of light on the wall announces the change to all within viewing distance. Within three minutes, the Web site is identically updated, deleting strawberry and welcoming lemon.

While the co-owner of this family-owned scoop shop said he likes the RFID technology, he's fonder of the push nature of his current flavor updater--where he tells his customers what he has--rather than the pull nature of a system in which his customers tell him what they want. When does customer feedback become too much?

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Posted in CRM, E-Commerce, In-Store, IT Strategy/Industry, Premium Content, RFID
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