Calculating your tab the RFID way

We've all read about the RFID tag industrial-complex, which is already tracking everything from cattle to cars parts. But in those frenzied conveyor-belt sushi restaurants of downtown Tokyo they've found another practical use for RFID. With patrons sitting elbow-to-elbow, grabbing at sashimi as it sails past, it's not uncommon to see discarded dishes stacked 20-plates high — a real hassle when each dish has a different price. About 120 sushi bars so far are now using a new speedy system called "Oaiso" (meaning check), which uses RFID tag-embedded sushi plates to tally the bill. Servers just place a scanner on the looming sushi-dish tower, which sends the total to the register,
making the customer-turnover that much faster. The Japanese government and industry types are hoping that applications like this, and other more standard product-control uses, will stimulate growth in the RFID market to as high as "17 trillion yen ($159.2 billion) by 2010 or 2011". The only way that's going to happen is for RFID to be everywhere, and in Japan RFID tags are expected to be inserted into almost anything that can be tracked, from library books to public records.