Check out the new checkout

If you consider the self-checkout registers at Home Depot and Wal-Mart a dangerous precedent, be advised: This is just the start.

The checkout lane of the not-so-distant future has no register.

No clerk.

Not even a laser scanner.

Just wheel your cart past an antenna hidden in the door frame that tallies the bill and charges your account.

"Right now we can scan 1,000 items a second from up to 30 feet," said Tom Coyle, senior vice president of IconNicholson, a New York firm that has developed a wireless checkout. "The radio waves don't penetrate liquids like milk or metal foil yet, but we're close."

For years the techies selling such gee-whiz gadgetry have been pushing retailers to buy into this Jetsons vision. Now they have drummed up enough money for liftoff on the tool that makes the wireless store possible. Led by Wal-Mart Stores, three of the world's biggest retailers and 137 of their top suppliers last month began working the kinks out of the basic building block of radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags.

Most retailers are sitting this one out. Yet about 11 percent of U.S. retail companies plan to spend something on RFID in 2005, up from about 5 percent last year. They foresee a long trek of experimentation (switching on one recent Wal-Mart experiment accidentally shut down a nearby freezer) driven mainly by the prospect of cheaper and more efficient logistics.

RFID tags would replace the bar code — the little 28-digit strip of stock-keeping unit numbers read by laser scanners. Smaller than a pinhead and thinner than a greeting card, the more sophisticated 128-bit computer chips come attached to a small antenna. Glued to a product, the transmitter broadcasts a signal that identifies each item plus its color, size, maker and date of manufacture. That means its path can be traced in real time from manufacturer to truck, warehouse and store down to the exact shelf until a customer takes it out the door.

RFID applications formed the backbone of the latest store-of-the-future put together by 23 vendors ranging from Intel to Cisco at the recent National Retail Federation convention in New York. They automated just about every sales task in a store.

"It puts the shopper in the middle of a computer," said Jack Reader, business development manager for Cisco Systems retail practice.