Walmart to Push RFID

bravehamster writes "According to this article over at MSNBC, Walmart is going to push its suppliers to start using RFID to track inventory by 2005. The article goes on to mention how it was Walmart who helped jumpstart widespread adoption of barcodes. The report also points out some of the barriers in the way of RFID acceptance, but never once mentions consumer privacy concerns. Guess that kind of stuff just isn't important anymore."

Comments

gun control

[Wordsmith]

I'm no gun control proponet, but I wonder if anyone has ever considered mandating these things inside handguns. ALthough there'd be a ton of black-market guns, guns built before the law, guns built outside of the us, etc around, the ones including an RFID would be awfully easy to detect in situations where security is paramount.

Not saying its a good idea, but I just wonder if its floating out there ...

Walmart = sleaze

[SuperBanana]

A friend and I were walking through walmart to get some engine coolant(minor emergency, no choice), and I expressed my distaste for walmart. She asked, "Why? Where else could you get all these wonderful things?"(points to grocery section, hardware, etc.)

My answer was rather simple. "Well, before Walmart, the center of my town- the local town hardware store, the local grocery store, and so on. But thanks to Home Depot and Walmart running all the local businesses out, now you can't get anything without driving 20+ minutes". So now, for the $2 in savings, I've got to burn $2 in gas just to get there. I've got to spend 5 minutes finding a parking space, 5 walking from the lot into the store, another 5 trying to find the section and get there, another 5-10 waiting in line...so on etc. That's 'better'?

All because the only thing consumers value these days is the pricetag- not all the other benefits that come from giving your business to a small, locally owned business...or the hidden costs(your time, travel expenses, etc). Lost your reciept? Walmart tells you to go fuck yourself,m you shoplifting scum! Joe at Joe's Hardware remembers selling you that door hinge a few days ago- so the answer is "hey, no problem, here's your money." Not to mention, Joe knows what he's talking about when you ask him a question about doors, instead of some PFY who blankly stares at you because you asked something other than "what aisle is ___ in?"

You know what? It's not the only thing that bugs me about Walmart- their people are downright sleazy. It's stuff like the stories about Walmart managers taking donated items out of charity dropboxes in the stores that were not in walmart bags, and restocking them onto the shelves. Why? Walmart claimed it was to prevent shoplifting(or, in this case, 'shopdonating'), and items not in Walmart bags must not have been legitimate purchases. The donation box was AFTER the registers, not before. Further- ever been in a Walmart? There's more security cameras than you can count- yet a)items were supposedly shoplifted, yet not caught on tape and b)supposedly walmart didn't have any security cameras covering the area where the donation box was. Uh huh. Oh, and don't get me started on Walmart's union-busting...

It's so frustrating to see these giant box stores pop up. A big part of the local economy shifts over to that one store- all the mom+pops die off, and everyone that worked for mom+pop end up working for Walmart, they get nice clean blue uniforms, and all is(mostly) good. What happens when Walmart goes the way of K-mart, Caldoors, Bradlees, etc...or decides that store isn't quite profitable enough? Oops. Smallville's unemployment just went to %50.

Re:Walmart = sleaze

[micromoog]

If my Post Office didn't have to pay someone $20/hr, plus full benefits and a month of vacation, to sort mail the postage rates would be a lot lower; you could get a high school kid to do this for minimum wage.

1. Postage rates are really low as it is. Is there any other way to send a letter to anywhere in the country for less than $0.40? Not even close.
2. Minimum wage is a fucking joke. The only people willing to work for that are high school students because they don't have to pay the rent. Nobody can actually live off of minimum wage.

Re:2 questions...

[costas]

You're assuming that it's to the interest of the retailer to leave the RFID active after you leave the store. That's just not the case. Let me clear up some RFID myths (and I am a retail systems consultant, BTW, this is my bread-and-butter):

1. RFIDs allow stores to track instances of products; i.e. a specific can of Coke (serial # so-and-so, part of case such-and-such that was shipped by Joe Q. Supplier) instead of the current UPC "class identifier", i.e. "this is just a can of Coke". Now, people read this and they just jump ahead and assume that a retailer, however big, is ready to pay millions and millions of dollars for infrastructure in their warehouses, distribution centers and ultimately stores, to track trillions of product instances. Wake-up call: no they're not, and no they will never be. At most they might track some informative 'class-attributes' to borrow an OOP term: things like supplier or lot number. The whole RFID-allows-instance-tracking is only useful for items whose management cost is much higher than its physical cost: think auto or airplane parts, drugs, etc; not Gap shirts. This will not go away for decades, even allowing for Moore's law to keep going and for lower associated IT costs following that same trend.
   
   
2. One added side-benefit of RFIDs is controling shrinkage, i.e. shoplifting. For that to actually work, and assuming instance-tracking is out of the question (see above) paid-off items have to be de-activated by the store itself upon checkout. Your questions are thus moot.
   
   
3. Besides shrinkage, lemme tell you a little secret: retailers are very, very, very competitive. Suppose they don't de-activate paid-off RFIDs and let the chips keep on responding to query signals. You know what will happen within a week of that being rolled out by someone like Wal-Mart? Target will set up a truck in a Wal-Mart parking lot and start measuring their sales. Do you think Wal-Mart will let that happen? And AFAIK there's no way to stop that from happening unless RFIDs come with built-in Public/Private Key infrastructure, which will only increase their managerial costs (a lot; just think of all the suppliers Wal-Mart and Target share!) re-inforcing my first point.
   

Now, instead of paranoid worries, I hope people start focusing on the promise of RFIDs: instant checkouts, instant inventories, instant customer feedback to the retailer (meaning better product choices by the stores) and much better inventory management (meaning lower prices!). Never mind trackable warranties, potential theft prevention/insurance, etc, etc, etc...