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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
It'll be easier that barcodes - thus faster to pay and leave the store.
:)
In fact you can just pay on your way out without really having to queue, just walk thru the rfid scanner gateway gadget thing..
You'll be able to get into walmart, pick up a pack of tin-foil hats and leave in no time
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... as store greeters
Stick a bar code thingy one some ones back and watch them set off the alarm as they walk out the door.
From the article: "RFID tags contain a small chip and an antenna, usually coiled, to broadcast a signal. They were originally attached to Allied planes in World War II to distinguish them from enemy aircraft.
I find this hard to believe. Maybe they mean that the mechanism is the same ? Can somebody please shed some light on this ?
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 think that RFID will easily replace the barcode within the next 2 to 3 years. Like you were asking, when is the price going to go down? Right now it's low, very low but still more than printing a barcode. RFID technology is still growing and the tags are becoming smaller. In 2 to 3 years the price will be pennies.
Don't expect retailers to adopt it right away though. People watch and follow WalMart but no one really adopts new ideas like they do. I'm not endorsing them or even condoning them, just observing. Think about other retailers, go into their stores and see what kind of registers they're running. Look at see what kind of LDT/LRTs they're running. That will give you an idea of where they're at. Registers running DB9s, DB25s, Null Modem Cables, Pentium I and II class processors and even older technology...
The point is that retailers are too slow to adapt to new technology because it cuts into their numbers.
There is a library or two in Michigan that use RFID tech on all of their books. It's great they can locate a book by running a scan for it and go to the exact location. Imagine being able to find that last can of Chicken Noodle soup. Where's my soup dammnit?!?
-Scott
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.
As I understand it, current RFID solutions are based on small silicon chips - which are probably going to remain rather expensive, even in bulk (at least compared to a bar code). The real explosion of RFID will probably come with the commercialisation of any of the large-scale non-vacuum deposition semiconductor techniques - printable metals, organic polymer transistors etc.
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.
Yes, we want to know whether the chips would invade customers' privacy. Yet nowhere in the article is this issue truly addressed. Privacy is again mentioned further down in the article:
RFID has a dazzling allure in the retail industry, where enthusiasts envision every product having a digital tag instead of a bar code. A can of soda, for instance, could be tracked from manufacture to warehouse to store to a customer's RFID-equipped refrigerator.
That scenario unnerves privacy advocates, who worry about a corporation's being able to track a customer's every move.
Wal-Mart's plan, thus far, is nowhere close to that vision, Dillman said in an interview at the company's northwest Arkansas headquarters.
Does the "thus far" bother you as much as it bothers me? They say that the chips will be attached to boxes/packages/crates, not individual products. Great for people who buy individual products rather than by the box or crate (yeah, some people do buy crates of pop or deodorant or whatever). And even if the chips are only on crates now, how long will it be until chips on the individual products is the rule, not the exception? Because those without chips on individual products would be deemed as "in the technological dark ages?" "Left behind?"
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Given all of the other information about WalMart's record as an employer, I predict RFID tags will be applied to their employees' badges before they are deployed on a larger scale to individual retail items.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
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.
Wal-mart is one of our bigger customers, and they originally has us slated to be an early adopter of RFID in the case.
We were supposed to be working on this in 2004, however they pushed out implementation out to beyond 2006. As far as I know they didn't say why either.
All I know is that we're not slated to be doing anything with RFID anytime in the near future, and just six months ago we were planning on gearing up to implement across our entire supply chain.
That's $0.30 - $0.40 per CASE, not per item.
It's for warehouse inventory tracking, not shelf stocking.
You'd think people would at least read the article summary.
"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.
You have to be pretty close to the tag to read it. The walmart folks have large tags (4" to 6") on their boxes. The larger the tag, the further away it can be read. The distance of reading is a function of tag size and power.
So, unless they get super powerful readers, they won't be able to tell that you have a pair of granny underwear at home. (900mhz readers have their own problems, especially in countries other than the US) If you don't like the tag, cut it up. I really don't see the big deal with this. Can a tinfoil hat person explain to me why this is such a bad thing?
(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,
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I must have read 50 comments and not one of them was about RFID tags, which is what the post was about. Moderators should be modding these posts as Off Subject.
My two cents...
I have looked at RFID tag systems and right now they are too expensive for item level tagging. This is what Wal*Mart originally wanted to do. It's alot more efficient than bar code, but way more expensive (right now).
Then they switched to mandating pallet (or box) level tagging which is still helpful, but not very expensive.
I think if more companies use RFID for pallet level tagging the prices will come down and they can then move to item level tagging. I would guess 3-5 years befor item level tagging is affordable.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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
Ok, let's take just a minute to hold off on our knee-jerk walmart bashing and think about and interesting RFID idea:
When I go to a store, what is the #1 thing I hate? Waiting in line. There is nothing worse than seeing only a few registers open with huge lines. My time is valuable. I would like to just be able to WALK OUT OF THE STORE WITH MY STUFF. Let the RFID detectors track all the merchandise, then all I have to do is show someone my credit card and ID and sign for it all.
This time savings alone would boost the economy and our standard of living -- think about how many wasted hours you've spent in lines, when you could have been spending time with your family or friends, working to get some more dough, etc.
And frankly I don't give a crap about the privacy concerns -- as long as stores still accept cash, it's the consumer's choice as to how much privacy they want. And, of course, no one is forcing anyone to go to stores whose policies they disagree with.
- jonathan.