IDG Contributor Network: Target prepping stores with 'no shopping cart, no bag'

When Target on Wednesday (Dec. 9) opened its Target Wonderland in New York City, it described the pop-up as a "16,000-square-foot part-store, part-holiday playground." And although that's a fair description, it was actually a clever retail IT RFID trial. Target corporate has a vision of a new kind of physical store to compete with online rivals, one that attempts to sidestep the drudgery of shopping by wiping out the need for customers to lug around their purchases through the store's aisles.

It's called Target Wonderland, and the way it works is simple: Shoppers are issued RFID-tag lanyards when they arrive and they scan those tags next to any products they want to purchase. The shoppers don't take possession of those products until checkout. (By the way, anyone reading the description of this process in Target's statement would likely be confused, as it strongly implies that the lanyards possess RFID scanners instead of RFID tags. Target had crafted the reference for consumers and thought it was easier to phrase that way.)

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