What ever happened to the 5-cent RFID tag?

Here’s my question for the day: What ever happened to the 5-cent tag?

If you’ve been reading my blog the last week or so, I’ve been writing a lot about what I like to think of as an RFID revival. Following a year or two lull, RFID technology is once again on the minds of many in the market.

Yesterday, I was talking to Maggie Bidlingmaier, senior manager of global compliance for Avery Dennison, about a project they’re doing with a major European retailer. I’ll write more about this next week.

During our conversation, I asked Bidlingmaier why she was so bullish on the business right now. “We’re seeing interest from a number of companies across a wide variety of verticals,” Bidlingmaier told me. “It’s now a maturing technology, which means the price points for readers and tags are attractive across the marketplace.”

Attractive tag prices! That got me to thinking: Whatever happened to the 5-cent RFID tag? If you’ve followed this space for any length of time, you might recall that just about every RFID prognosticator worth his 2-cents was predicting that the tipping point for RFID in the supply chain was a Gen II smart label priced at a nickel. I realized I hadn’t heard anyone talking about the cost of RFID tags for a couple of years. What happened?

“We’re not there yet,” Bidlingmaier said. “But it turns out there are a lot of business cases where a more expensive tag still makes sense.”

I got a similar reaction from Michael Liard, research director, RFID and Contactless, ABI Research. “The five-cent tag was relevant when people were talking about item-level tagging in the retail supply chain,” Liard said. “What happened instead is that asset tracking became a hot spot of activity, as did high end apparel. Guess what, when you’re talking about high end, high volume goods, a nickel price point isn’t so important.”

So, how much does a smart label cost today? According to Liard it depends on the volume of the order and the functionality that you’re looking for, but if you’re looking for a finished smart label for retail compliance, they’re still ten to fifteen cents.