Is RFID on its way to becoming a household word? In an interview in USA Today last month with columnist Kevin Maney, radio frequency identification evangelist Kevin Ashton revealed the real reason why the world should adopt RFID technology: pickup bots.

What's a pickup bot? It's a domestic robot that goes around your house picking up all the items you left scattered behind as you raced out of the house to catch the commuter train to work. As Ashton explained to Maney, someday in the future, when everything bought at retail stores is tagged with a radio frequency device, the robot will be able to tune into the signals emitted from items strewn about the house and retrieve them.

But that's not all that RFID will do in the world of the future, Ashton told Maney. RF tags on refuse, for example, will do away with the need to sort trash for recycling. At a rubbish-collection facility, trucks will dump their loads on a conveyor belt that passes by an RFID reader. The belt will then use the signals from the RFID tags to direct plastic jugs and metal cans into the appropriate bins.

Maney's column was filled with other fascinating tidbits about the promise of RFID. In addition to Ashton's prediction about tidier and neater households of the future, Maney also called attention to some comments by Stephen Ho, who recently received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ho has developed the concept of "location-relaxed storage" for warehousing. When every item arriving at a distribution center has an RFID tag that emits signals identifying its location, it will no longer be necessary to store it according to type of product. In other words, "organized chaos" could become an efficient warehousing practice.

As intrigued as I am by speculation about how RFID might change our lives in the future, I still harbor concerns about the here and now. Many warehouses and distribution centers are under pressure to adopt RFID even though the cost for this still-developing technology is high.

At the moment, the cost of RFID tags ranges between 25 and 50 cents for each pallet or case. That may not sound like very much, but a session at last month's Council of Logistics Management conference in Philadelphia illustrated why that cost has become such an issue for shippers.

In that session, a major consumer-goods manufacturer detailed its costs for moving one case of product from its plant to a retail distribution center. The cost per carton was $1.06: 11 cents for storage, 12 cents for handling, and 83 cents for transportation. If the company has to add 25 cents for an RF tag, that would increase its per-case distribution cost by nearly 20 percent. Slap on a 50-cent active tag, and you have a 40-percent increase.

At a time when freight rates are rising steadily and are likely to increase by five percent or more next year across all modes, cost control is a problem that confronts all logistics executives these days. Despite the fact that RFID (like pickup bots) is an attractive concept with many potential benefits, I suspect that adoption will be delayed as companies find they can't afford the additional costs in their distribution budgets—at least not until tag prices come way down.

James Aaron Cooke, Executive Editor