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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?"
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.
I agree. The main problem with huge chain stores such as WalMart is that they push local businesses out of business, ensuring that most of the profit generated by them gets funnelled back to the shareholders rather than the local community.
This is financially destructive to local mini-economies, as the meagre minimum wage doled out by them to local employees barely feeds anything back of worth.
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.
The original poster does have a point though, if you interpret his recommendation to boycot WalMart to mean that we (the consumers) should change our habits so that we don't shop there as long as they don't care about us or our privacy. In other words, make it so that respecting customers translates into profits. And that's perfectly valid, actually the preferred, way for consumers to change behaviour of corporations in capitalistic system. (The other way would be making laws that restrict use of RFID tags, which in captilistic society should only be used as a last resort measure since it interferes with competition and free market.)
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
There was a time, 25 - 30 years back, when every item in a grocery store was individually price-tagged, and the cashier would read the tags on the item and enter it into the cashregister. Then barcodes were introduced, and when there were errors in the barcode database, many stores advertised that you would get the item free!
Eventually the individual price-stickers vanished and you are required to remember the prices on a cart full of items. Last week I opted to take advantage of an in-store special on coffee, but at the checkout, my receipt showed the regular price. There was no dispute. The coffee display - and special price - was clearly visable from our location, but the cashier did not have the power to override the barcode data. I could pay full price and get the coffee, cancel the coffee and not get it, or pay full price and wait in line at 'customer service (sic)' where I had to sign a docket to get my refund!
RFID tags will be in everything. You will come to accept it. and when your are injured my their misapplication, either though somebodies incompetence or mallice, you will be further inconvenienced for meager compensation. It will not take 25 to 30 years.
What's scary is, the consumer doesn't care either. Maybe it's because we're trapped between one crap company and another, but no one does anything to protect themselves. The company will employ anything to raise profits, and although it may invade our privacy, the consumers dont care.
We're getting fucked, and are yelling out "MORE!! DONT STOP!!"
..and i am mostly no different
Because it is not just as simple as "You pay less for a product, therefore you are saving money."
When a Walmart opens in an area, the local average wage goes down. Way down. This negatively impacts where you live: lower wages = lower tax base = lower services or higher taxes.
Walmart offers such horrible benefits, most employees use the benefit package of their significant other for health coverage. This means that it generally costs local business more on benefits after a Walmart comes to town. The result is higher prices for the stuff that you don't buy at Walmart.
So, next time you think you are saving 5 cents on your Pop Tarts, remember, it's probably costing you a lot more in other areas.
- Tony
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.
(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
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