Justin Fox, Columnist

Your Clothes Will Be on the Radio

The tag on your brand-new sweater might hold retail's answer to Amazon.

January 18, 2017 at 7:38 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Tiny conquerors.
Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images

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In the early 2000s, it seemed as if radio frequency identification -- RFID, for short -- was about to take over the world. For better, or for worse. As Josh McHugh put it in Wired in 2004:

The tags, with chips that could hold up to 2 kilobytes of data and be scanned from 25 feet away, were going to revolutionize supply chains and retailing. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. informed its suppliers in 2003 that it expected them to attach RFID tags to the pallets and cases of stuff they sent to its distribution centers. International Business Machines Corp. ran ads promising a world of ubiquitous RFID in which, among other things, you could stroll out of a supermarket with your pockets full of food and pay for it all automatically. Privacy advocates warned that any burglar with an RFID reader would be able to figure out what was in your closet and how much it was worth.