Does RFID work?

I come across a number of articles almost daily that "blame" the lackluster success of RFID technology on its poor performance. I was surprised to learn that readers often don't read, and tags sometime don't respond. A typical success rate hovers anywhere at 90-97% performance, which may be ok for a casual observer, but really sucks for any industrial/high-volume settings, where errors are measured at 1 per million (ppm).

Any thoughts? Have you come across any RFID performance issues?