Visiting the Metro Future Store in Tönisvorst

As part of the RFID courses I have been giving together with Matthias Lampe for the European EPC Competence Center (EECC) for some years now I finally had the chance to visit Metro's new Future Store in Tönisvorst.
First of all, it's a brand new hypermarket huge in size with wide alleys which makes the market quite appealing even without the 'future' label.
What attracts media and what probably is most appealing are a couple of gadgets:

a digital advertising column built of a rotating line of led's
a self-checkout for customer's reading the barcode with their mobile phones (as nowhere mentioned: which by the way was developed by Robert Adelmann of ETH)
download of the 'supermarket' ringtone via bluetooth (I wonder who will ever do that, but I might be wrong;)
the 'multi-component' menue - works without technology, based on color codes, one can easily 'customize' meals based certain side-dishes and main courses - the color code helps for achieving 'compatibility'... I can imagine that as quite successfull.
the 'sound shower' removes the need of putting on heads when listening to CD's since the sound is directed only to the user standing under the shower. It's a quite fascinating experience. Just imagine what you could do when covering the entire ceiling with tiles of that system and combining it with indoor localization...unobtrusive whispering anytime anywhere.
then there is the wine testing, operated through supermarket's member card. Looks nice and works well.
the make-up machine gives suggestions on products by virtual make-up: user's photo get's overlayed with the make-up effects.
the skin machine evaluates the user's fat in the skin and recommends products. Well...without a guided tour, I probably would not have spent attention to that machine...
then, there is the check-out which I have seen in operation in the US already years ago. It works but at least currently there are plenty of human 'helpers' in place.
Finally, I could see the first 'kill-tag' machine. It works but 'interestingly, since May 2008 only five users have ever killed tags' mentioned our guide proudly and deriving from that that users wouldn't care about RFID anymore. But why should they if in the current store not even a single product is tagged with RFID!?

Overall, it was a nice visit - just it had nothing to do with RFID as it was our course visitors' and ourselves' expectation...
Finally, the famous robot did not work either;(