Carry a beacon (or a bunch of them) with you into a shop and the store will recognize you the next time you enter. That's handy! It's like a cookie that you physically bring every time. ~
Boy oh boy, this technology is going to run into a lot of misinformed speculation like the above. I know that YOUR LOCATION DATA is super important to you and all the technology ghosts are trying to steal it from you but that is not how this works.
Only the specialized economists who suggest people would ever need to have signs, surely. Also, the rare restaurant that wants to garner advocates. Then perhaps amateur entomologists. Works engineers who want to know when something erodes would surely bury fiber optics rather than a RFID or battery device with 30 year lifetime.
Nobody would use beacons this way. They don't have to -- your cell phone, if it passively scans for Wi-Fi, will check into the local access points for you.
Or, in other words, no thanks.