Old Navy just got some Black Mirror–esque technology. In a viral TikTok, Kallie Ann (@kalliefoodie) shares that she is in the Old Navy fitting room when she notices something peculiar.
“Oh, that’s pretty cool,” she thinks. “Like, you can ask them to bring you something, like, if you need a different size or whatever. But then I was looking at it, and it somehow, like, knows what I have in the room.”
She scrolls through the items on the screen and shows viewers that the clothes are the same ones she has hanging in the dressing room.
“How does it know?” she questions.
No, it’s not cameras
In the comments section, viewers provided explanations for the technology.
“There’s a old man in the attic with binoculars and a iPad,” one joked. “Old navy is doing their part to create jobs.”
A second explained that it’s “The same system (rfid) that Target uses to find items. Have you ever seen their employees walking around waving a scanner to locate an item?”
“It’s very similar to Zara’s self checkout system; it detects each item by its tag,” another added. “So there must be a sensor in each fitting room that detects each tag you go in with. Pretty cool!”
One viewer had a suggestion for Old Navy. “If they were really smart they would give outfit suggestions like they do on the website to make you spend more money,” they wrote. “They get me every time.”
As it stands, the system was very successful at getting Ann to spend more money. “Tell me why new Old Navy fitting room def got me to spend an extra $50,” she wrote in an on-screen caption, followed by a crying emoji.
In the video’s description, she added, “Everything was on sale how could I say no,” followed by another crying emoji.
Another viewer lamented their low-tech Old Navy fitting rooms. “My old navy doesn’t even have a hook to hang my clothes,” they said.
So how does an RFID fitting room work?
An RFID Journal article explains, “Shoppers enter the fitting room with their selected garments, each of which has an RFID tag encoded with a unique ID. Once inside, shoppers hang the garments on a rod attached to the panel. The garments’ tags are detected by the reader, and the screen comes alive, displaying what the customer has brought in, and providing recommendations of similar products.”
@kalliefoodie Everything was on sale how could I say no ?
♬ original sound – Kallie Ann
The Mary Sue reached out to Kallie Ann via TikTok comment and direct message and to Old Navy via press email.
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