Pizza Pizza's rollout is the largest quick-service food segment application of RFID technology in North America, but it won’t be the last. Where consumer throughput and transaction speed are a must, and modest ticket averages are common, RFID appears to be the wave of the payment future — a wave that could grab a large share of the market from comparably slower forms of cashless payment, such as credit and debit cards.

"When you look at a line at a McDonald’s or Wendy’s, that extra 2 to 3 seconds saved per customer is very important," said Paul Barron, editor of Louisville, Ky.-based QSRWeb.com. "And even though credit card companies are going to no-signature-required transactions, I think RFID is going to be the natural evolution of cashless payment … . It drives repeat visits and increases customer loyalty because people will go where it’s fastest."

I am surprised that supermarkets and retailers like Wal-Mart haven't already embraced this technology. It will eliminate jobs, as all that will be required is to move the cart forward and a detailed sales receipt can be forthcoming in a matter of seconds. All the personnel that will be required is monitoring of machine uptime (and a good bit of that task can be automated) and security.