While Tesco has been playing the typical chicken-and-egg game with suppliers on who will initially fund tagging all products, it's had to quietly cut back its RFID efforts as it is trying to work with European UHF regulations, said Raghu Das, CEO of European RFID consulting firm IDTechEx.

Tesco has been enjoying a strong four percent revenue boost from RFID-enabled inventory improvements, but it's been applying the tags by hand, which is not a tactic that can be continued indefinitely. Tesco, which ordered 2,000 RFID readers just two years ago, is in the RFID game for the longterm and is begging suppliers to take a more aggressive position.

But, Das reports, they have had to sharply pull back RFID efforts because of reader problems that relate to UHF regulations from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The problem involves the standard's approach to LBT (Listen Before Talk, which is a concept my 8-year-old daughter also has issues with).

LBT's intent is to make sure that readers send out signals and listen for any other nearby readers on a similar frequency, to avoid interference. But, Das said, the standard's efforts to generously avoid interference has caused Tesco readers to hear other readers as far as two kilometers away, which could easily include the readers at other retailers in addition to Tesco's own readers.

"Outside the U.S., the UHF regulations are in a shambles," Das said, adding that Germany's independent efforts means that this problem is not an issue for the Metro Group. Italy has its own UHF issues, he said, because the military won't let many retailers use the necessary frequencies.

The U.K.'s Marks & Spencer is faring much better because of the nature of its operations. Because they make their own clothes, they can avoid many of the supplier hesitations and their liberal use of small handheld readers means that the UHF problems are less of a concern.

In other Tesco news, NCR on Wednesday announced that the chain—which is already the largest user of self-checkout systems in Europe—had purchased an unspecified number of additional self-checkout systems. It will allow Tesco to install self-checkout "in more than 50 percent of the front-end lanes at the Bishopsgate Metro store in London," the NCR statement said.