RFID in Japan

Club SEGA Osaki in Shinagawa, Tokyo started accepting RFID payments (i.e., payments by using Edy cards and wallet phones) some time ago and the company is loving RFID payments.

Recently, they put out a notice in the store, which says " Please use cards because we now only accepts digital money for playing games." They used to accept both coins and digital money, but not anymore. Now, coin slots of all arcade game machines are sealed with a sticker that says "Edy Only".

Why does the compnay like RFID payments so much? It's because the company now have all records about which games which customer played, how much a customer spent in the past, which other games a customer who played a certain game played, etc.

Keiichi Ito, the store's manager, says that most customers accepted the mandatory use of RFID payments. Earlier, the store's staff explained to each customer about RFID payments right after customers entered the store, however, "it negatively affected customers' motivation to play games." So, the store's new strategy is to explain about RFID payments when a customer sits in front of a game machine (i.e., just before he starts playing the game. )

Also, RFID payments freed the store's staff from the labor of collecting coins from each arcade game machine. Now the staff have more time to interact with customers.

via Nikkei Ryutsu Shimbun MJ, November 3, 2004, in Japanese

Posted by konomi at November 6, 2004 09:59 PM | TrackBack