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Wal*Mart continues push for RFID adoption
John3 writes "Wal*Mart is continuing to push for vendors to add RFID tags to cases of products for easier tracking through their warehouse distribution system. Most vendors have until 2006 to comply, but their top 100 suppliers must have the tags in place by 2005. Wal*Mart stopped their push for retail level tagging last summer, but by forcing tagging at the wholesale level the cost of the technology will drop as vendors comply with Wal*Mart's decree. How long before price is no longer a barrier to RFID item level tagging?"
They care about profits, not people.
They care about profits, not privacy.
Wal*Mart is evil, and you should avoid their stores like the plague. Use local grocery stores and department stores whenever possible.
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Same thing with barcodes longtime ago. It makes a big difference in productivity. omi
As usual, Wally World is asking others to innovate on their behalf, to their benefit, and asking the supplier to foot the bill. The suppliers don't have a choice, because if you're not in Wal~Mart, you're not anywhere.
Wal-Mart is implementing this system to better track their inventory and manage it. What privacy right of yours or mine does it affect?
The tin-foil hat brigade on slashdot hates RFID even when it has nothing to do with them. It's amazing that people to immediately defend p2p's legitimate uses, but not RFID.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
If there is profit in it, your rights will be steamrolled.
First the cases will be tagged, then the products.
If WalMart cared about rights, they would pay employees what they owe them
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I don't have a problem with Wal*Mart using RF to track, stock and sell their wares. I mean as a consumer, hasn't had a bar code or worse, a price tag slapped across the instructions. And I'm sure it would be nice from a store manager's point of view to merely walk down the aisles with a nothing more than a receiver to do inventory
No, my problem is the same issue I have with SPYWARE. Okay, now we have this technology embedded in a coat I buy for my daughter. Now, Wal*Mart can make deals with other companies such a McDonalds to track every time a 4 year old walks into to the door.
And heaven forbid they link-up such tracking with our credit cards.
Oh I know
--- have you healed your church website?
What's particularly troubling about this is not that they're looking to use RFID in their warehouses, but the way they're strong-arming their vendors to adopt it. Walmart has a lot of vendors; it stands to reason that if these vendors are forced to adopt RFID, its adoption at other businesses (grocery store chains, Kmarts, etc.) is only a matter of time.
Not that I shop at Walmart to begin with--I try to make a habit out of not shopping at places that sell crappy products, fire people for trying to organize unions, and force people to work unpaid overtime.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
I'm sorry, but somebody had to say it...
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
As usual, Wally World is asking others to innovate on their behalf, to their benefit, and asking the supplier to foot the bill. .
You assume that the supplier enjoys no benefits from this. But the supplier receives the same benefits as does Wal-Mart -- smoother supply chain operations with faster throughput, lower costs, and higher service quality. All that manual crosschecking of pallets and paperwork is an expensive waste of time for eveyone. If Wal-Mart saves money by automatically scanning everything that enters their premises, the supplier saves money by automatically scanning everything that leaves their premises. Its all about keeping track of stuff without spending a bunch of money.
Wal-Mart would never do this if they did not think it provided long-term cost-savings (and that includes any price increases that suppliers will be forced to pass on). Wal-Mart's mandate only forces suppliers to get off their butts and innovate. The only losers are competing retailers who refuse to adopt RFID and have to pass on the costs of their inefficiencies to consumers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I don't see any problem with retailers and suppliers using RFID. It should make tracking misplaced orders, damaged orders, loss, quantities, inventory ordering/re-ordering and many other aspects of the job much simpler. It will increase efficiency and productivity.
I don't have a problem with products being RFID'd in-store, either. As long as the RFID tag is removed before the consumer walks out of the store (during the check-out process), I have ZERO problems with it.
I can buy a typical logic chip for 49 cents in quantities of one, and the RFID tags don't need the same elaborate packaging or physical pinouts. There's the antenna, but that's still easier than wire bonds.
A picture of an RFID card.
--- Ban humanity.
If you've ever worked in any kind of warehouse you'd understand the significance of using RFID technology to assist in everyday tracking of goods.
Wal-Mart being evil is a whole different story. There are 2 sides to every situation. Maybe if people gave a shit about anyone besides themselves we wouldn't have Republicans in the House, Senate, Judiciary and Executive Branch. That's all they sell. Fuck your neighbor, here's a tax cut.
When society differes from Wal-Mart I'll call them evil. Until then, it's status quo.
Maybe the supplier benefits. If they're lucky.
If RFID were such a golden opportunity for ROI, they'd already be doing it.
As far as losers, I bet a lot of retailers are looking at this situation and thinking "hey! That's great. All my suppliers will be on RFID by the time the technology is mature and the costs have settled down."
meh.
OK, what's the *real* point of having greeters? (I see some grocery stores do that too. Grrr.)
1. The happier the customers, the more they buy.
2. If you are met by a person when entering the store, you will be less likely to shoplift.
3. It's good karma for the store to hire senior members of the community.
4. All of the above.
?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
RFID technology is still in its infancy and as other posters have pointed out, it will not be until individual items are tagged that the danger to privacy will arise. That is still a few years away and there may even come to be benefits for consumers besides not having to line up to have your cart scanned. In the long run the danger of having market researchers wardriving meighbourhoods to take inventories of what products people use is a possibility, but so too is compiling your shopping list in much the same way or having your washing machine warn you that there is a red sock about to go into a load of whites. No doubt the dangers will arise before the benefits (aside from price reductions due to supply chain efficiencies) however I can think of no group better qualified than /. readers to come up with ways to mitigate the bad and ideas to exploit the potential benefits.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
Works in the wal-mart, or drives delivery trucks, or works in construction or as a contractor when the building was built.
For years now turnpikes and toll roads have had ezpass that allows you to pay tolls by barely slowing down.
Or you can live in a state that just doesn't have toll roads, where money for the highway system is payed for by *taxes*. It's rather a unique concept, as everyone benifits from a good highway network, everyone payes in their little chunk. You don't have to invest in tool booths nor any form of high-tech system of accounting, nor do you have the bottle neck effect resulting from slowing down to pay your damn toll.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I saw a lot of people talking in this direction so I thought I'd post a top level comment.
Wal*Mart has a policy; every year they will approach their vendors, and they will demand a 5% reduction in wholesale cost. AFAIK this is not negotiable.
For the first few years, it's doable. However, eventually the supplier will run out of fat to trim, and will start to cut into the meat.
This means (pick at least one):
Lower quality merchandise
Lower pay/benefits to workers
Offshore manufacturing
Levi Strauss used to make the best jeans on the planet. They employed many US workers, and you could buy a pair and wear them for 20 years. They now make NOTHING, and are nothing more than a relabeller of crappy asian knockoffs that wear out in a few dozen wearings. This is due mainly from pressure from their largest buyer, Wal*Mart.
This has happened to MANY companies. The problem is, by the time it gets down to deciding to offshore your manufacturing, you're screwed. You're 5+ years into the relationship with Wal*Mart by then, and they're your biggest customer. You've invested millions into production capacity to feed them. You do what they say or you go out of business. They know this, and they will crush your balls until you lower your price, and they don't give a damn if that means that you now have to close your US plant, turn the town it was in into a slum, and have your clothes made by 10 year old girls in the Phillipines. And if, in the end, you decide to not fire your US workers (or whatever) to drop your price to them, you'll quickly find out how one-sided your "relationship" with them was; they'll drop your ass into the pit of bankruptcy, find another supplier to screw, and not shed a tear.
By all means, if you want the quality of what you're buying to keep going down, and to eventually have everyone in the US employed flipping burgers for each other, keep shopping at Wal*Mart.
See, it's all very good to shout "capatalism" from the rooftops. But capitalism isn't strictly dollars. Consumer choice is part of the equation as well, and consumers make their choices NOT strictly on price, or everyone would be driving Kia's, or strictly on quality, or everyone would be wearing Carhartt's.
Personal morality also enters into purchasing decisions. A moral consumer does not just say "I'll buy whatever's cheapest, fuck everyone else." Retailers know that; if they didn't, you wouldn't see them backpedalling every time they get associated with sweatshops.
Also, capitalism doesn't usually take the form of a buyer waiving a death sentence at a seller and saying "Now, I think you're going to drop your price this year, RIGHT?" That's not capitalism, that's extortion.
China seems to think that they're the only country that investors will move their factories to. There are a lot of poor countries that would love to take any opportunities China refuses. One of them being China's neighbor, India, which is projected to have a larger population than China.
China needs to be careful in trying to determine whether it wagging the tail or is the tail itself.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
(1) It lets the supplier easily track cases and pallets all the way down the distribution chain down to point of final delivery. Right now what happens is that a semi-trailer full of stuff backs up to the loading dock, and someone counts/looks at/checks what they can see and signs for it. All the way down the line. That takes time, and is error prone, especially when things get busy. So if the truck driver has stolen a couple of cases of something, or the distribution center has "lost" a pallet, usually someone only spots this after the truck is long gone. Which then leads to the question, "Did someone steal it from here, or were we short 3 cases on the last order?" In a previous life, I worked on a point-of-sale system for a catalog store in Canada. and "shrinkage" (as it was known) was running about 5-15%.
With an evil RFID tag on each case and pallet, a reader or two on each loading dock and a bunch of software behind it, you can at least track how many cases and pallets are being moved on and off each truck as the pallets are being loaded/unloaded. So the supplier/distributor/customer (that's the store itself, not you or I buying a pack of razor blades) knows more reliably what they received. "Hey, there's only 157 cases on these pallets -- we're three short"
(b) By knowing that a given set of pallets and cases have been received at the customer site, then the correct billing information can be generated. Large companies have an awful lot of money tied up in "disputed stock".
Example: "The SlashDot Karma Korporation" claims to have shipped 200 cases of clues to "Microsoft", but "Microsoft" has no record of receving them. Sometimes it can take several billing cycles (say one month for each cycle) to sort this out; sometimes the vendors will just give up. Large corporations have millions and millions of dollars tied up in disputes like this. Note that I'm assuming that the customer is acting in good faith and has lost the paperwork or something.
Coupling RFID tags on pallets and cases with some sort of electronic inventory control/purchase order control system at the vendor level speeds up the process by which money changes hands for goods. We have an electronic transaction which says, "I received 157 cases of clues on these pallets on this date. This was part of purchase order #65535".
There's a couple of sets of people that this is bad for -- the people who steal from warehouses and trucks, and the odd disreputable vendor/distributor/customer who will have a harder time claiming "we sent it/we never got it/pallet, wot pallet?".
In general, it is good for the vendor, the distributor and the corporate customer -- they can all track what was shipped where and when. This is new technology, and it will be a while before it all works reliably -- I think the public announcements that "our suppliers must be using this by the end of 2005" are in the nature of mission statements, and the reality will be later than that. I was working with software driving bar-code readers in 1975 in a similar set of applications, so this is nothing new!
But that's the promise of this technology, and that's why certain large companies (Wal*mart and DoD for example) are driving this supply side initiative. There's a lot of money (no, a LOT of money) at stake here, with lots of potential savings for both the vendor and the corporate consumer. Whether those savings get passed on to teh consumer I'll leave as an exercise to the student.
So for me this looks like a good idea. I can see the privacy issues in having bar-codes on consumer packaging/embededd inside your under-shorts, but this is not that.
And to paraphrase Robin Williams, My opinion of CASPIAN is that Kathrine Albrecht needs to get laid more than any white woman in history,
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.htm l
If you are not familiar with the way of Wal-Mart, you really need to read the above article. It goes into detail how Wal-Mart continually pressures its suppliers to drop their prices. Eventually, some of these suppliers decide to off-shore or have to go out of business.
And you know what this leads to? Lost jobs. So, basically US consumers are shopping themselves out of their own jobs. The sad thing is, the average consumer either cannot understand this or simply does not care about it. We live in sad times, where most people have no social conscience (although I suspect this has been a problem throughout the ages).
The really interesting thing to me is that Wal-Mart seems to be a lot more "evil" (acting like a monopoly) than anything I've read from Microsoft. The problem is that Wal-Mart isn't bullying consumers, they are bullying suppliers. But it's only a matter of time before these negative ripples reach consumers...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
That being said, the whole "We don't want WallMart here because they'll kill off our local stores" is bullshit. If people really would rather shop at small locally owned shops, they would, and WallMart would close up shop and move on. Instead, the very same people protesting the new WallMart are right there in line for the cheap crap they sell.
Can a small local store compete directly with WallMart? Of course not. Simple economics will tell you that. On the other hand, WallMart, because of they way they are run, cannot compete directly with small shops, either -- they sell different stuff in a much different environment. The problem really is, shoppers are willing to belly up to the WallMart trough -- simply put, they prefer cheap crap as long as the price is lower.
So, if you don't like what WallMart has to offer, shop elsewhere and encourage others to do so as well. Stop bitching about how WallMart "push[es] local businesses out of business" -- I've never seen WallMart logo wearing storm-troopers crashing through the windows of local shops and gunning down the shopkeepers, nor have I seen them herding shoppers into their stores at gunpoint.
Business relationships are always consensual. Either side can always Just Say No and terminate it for any reason, unless you have a contract that says otherwise. If someone isn't prepared to deal with this, then they deserve to lose.
That's right. A moral consumer says, "I'll buy whatever gives me the most value." And there is no "fuck everyone else" because when you choose to not do business with someone, you're not fucking them. You never owed them anything. The fact that business relationships are consensual, works in your favor too, see?If your values are such that buying from Wal-Mart doesn't get you what you want (because, for whatever reason, you prefer to use items that were made in Ohio instead of the Phillipines, or you prefer items that were hand-stitched for many hours instead of made in a few seconds by a machine) then you don't have to shop at Wal-Mart. You're not "fucking" the Phillipines if you buy from Mom'n'Pop, and I'm not "fucking" Mom'n'Pop when I buy stuff from the Phillipines.
It's not extortion, because nobody is forcing anything on the seller. He can always Just Say No. If his overseas counterparts are able to out-compete him in his business, then he should find another business. Competition, technology, and the need for business owners to adapt to realities, are not death.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
How is asking for a decent living wage, one in which someone can pay their bills and not have to worry about descending into poverty at the first sign of illness "crying for a handout".
I think you also forget that the US is the only country in the western world where providing a decent level of healthcare for everyone is treated with contempt. Last time I checked, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, etc were all in the "real world".
As I've said in previous posts, a sick child that needs a vital operation is a sick child that needs a vital operation. Whether or not her parents can afford to pay for whatever it takes to make her well again should not factor into the equation.
If you're proud of wanting to live in a society that's intrinsically divided into "haves" and "have-nots" then just say so. But don't pretend that just because you haven't ended up working for an uncaring employer like Walmart (yet) that everyone else can do the same.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg