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NYT: Wal-Mart Slows RFID Plans, Suppliers Resist
securitas writes "The New York Times' Barnaby Feder reports that Wal-Mart has scaled back its plans to deploy RFID tags because the majority of its top 100 suppliers will not be able to meet the Jan. 1, 2005 deadline that the retailer demanded. Suppliers are resisting Wal-Mart's RFID demand for a variety of reasons according to AMR Research. Only 40 suppliers will meet the deadline, with two suppliers 'so tied up in a complete overhaul of their entire information technology infrastructure that they have put off attempting to introduce radio tagging.' A more pragmatic reason for the delay is that 'no one who uses the technology has systems that can reliably read the information 100 percent of the time in factories, warehouses and stores; Wal-Mart said the rate was around 60 percent in its stores.' It's hard to make the case that RFID will help track inventory when you can't reliably find 40% of it."
The title makes it sound as though Wal-Mart's suppliers are resisting the slowing of the introduction of RFID, while the truth is quite the reverse - that the slow-down is happening because of supplier resistence, not despite it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I thought RFID tags were supposed to be so cheap, it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg to implement them?
as a % out of this situation in profit and capital
Customer
Wallmart
Distributer
Manufacturer
then perhaps you can understand the remaining parties reluctance to make the expenditure
Given that Wal-Mart has been bullying its suppliers since donkey's years, it's high time they got a taste of their own medicine. However, rumour has it that the Pedigree has pawed the line in this initiative. Only, they're calling it Arf-ID.
cough, sorry
I have an RFID card I leave in my wallet that allows me access to parts of my work building. much better than swipe cards.
I'd love them to be used in shops too. if you could just walk round a shop putting things in a bag, put the bag on a pay station, insert your credit card, type your PIN, and leave... I think that would be great, and a real case of technology actually making life better.
and the only people (*cough* luddites *cough*) I want to hear privacy complaints from are the people who are posting from an internet cafe, wearing a disguise, putting a tinfoil blanket over themselves and the computer, and then paying with cash they've cleaned any DNA from. and you guys probably don't even go to shops ever since they introduced the eeeeeevvvviiiilll of barcodes anyway.
I can only find what I'm looking for in Wal Mart about 60% of the time anyway, so really it all balances out in the long run...
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
RFID technology is the greatest threat to individual freedom in our times. In order for there to be liberty, we must be free to be anonymous. "Tagging" things -- making items identifiable -- is really nothing more than a step toward tracking us (we are our things in spite of what fight club would have us believe). It all began when the U.S. laid back and allowed social security numbers to be attached to every citizen....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I like RFID in the same way I like barcodes. Both are amazing for certain applications (RFID kinda beats the pants off barcodes for most things, though it needs to be backed up by a barcode and a human readable identifier...)
Their usefulness, however, in my mind, does not preclude discussion of their drawbacks. Sure, there are people who are screaming BAN RFID OMG WTF but they're already the fringe and are being officially and unofficially ignored. Just because some fringies are mewling does not make the entire line of inquiry invalid.
I think it is a reasonable point to make in general with technology that once we feel that our assumptions in terms of civil life are being changed, we have to step up and say something.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I usually can't find about 90% of what I'm looking for a Wal-Mart
Now my crazy grandpa will have to find a NEW Number of the Beast to frighten my kids with.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Granted, that is normally how the bugs are worked out - you put it in and force the technology providers to keep working on it until it hits the 98%+ accuracy range.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
I give up
I am currently working with one of the RFID companies that is "working" with walmart on the actual implementation of RFID. Let me tell you that there is no foreseable ROI in the near future. Currently at a cost of about 25 cents a tag, it is much too expensive to be worth it for anyone. The technology is in its infancy so there are so many problems we have encountered so far.
One of the problems is the tags. Not only do they cost so damn much, but they are also not very high quality. There's a feature called "locking" which allows you to set a number on the tag and not allow it to change, but when using this we have too high a failure rate to be effective (10-30% depending on the tag type). So we had to turn off the locking, meaning its much easier to change the unique number associated with the tags (which will be a problem when tags hit the retail sector) and now we only get around a 1-2% failure rate. But when doing high volumes, even this small percent is expensive to deal with.
Another is the hardware. Part of the tag writing problems we have seen may be due to the tags and/or the reader/writer units. But right now, some tags get created and written to with no problems, but when they go by a reader, the reader just does not see a number on that tag, meaning as i said before its either a bad tag or some sort of incompatibility/problem with the reader unit. Currently we are trying to get the tags applied cost effectively, but unfortunately its pretty much boiling down to using people to grab tags from a RFID printer and hand-apply everything.
We have also been having trouble verifying all the product on a pallet, and certainly cannot expect to read 100% of product 100% of time. Some product is easy to see, but depending on the density/material in the materials on the pallet, it can be very difficult to read many of the tags.
Software is another hinderance. While the company i have been working with has had its large share of problems in the last few months, they are getting better, but still are not perfect. And unless things work perfect, it can cause so many problems. One small chink in the software can make it inoperable (essentially crashing the software a-la Windows), but the software is slowly getting more and more stable.
The fact that Walmart madated this is certainly causing issues, especially for smaller companies and products that companies make almost no money on anyway. For us, we have a very expensive product so tagging at the case level is not too big a deal (it still has/will cost us millions of dollars to do), but just remember theres lots of companies that make almost no profit on the case level and that 25 cents for a tag eats pretty much all of their profits. RFID isn't going away, theres just too much potential. RFID can certainly work as a technology, as seen in the success of toll-tags like EZ-Pass and Smart-Tag. And many of these problems would have arisen anyway in the future, its just that the Walmart mandate basically caused the problems to happen faster.
I have no wish to comment on Wal-Mart.
:-)
I am trying to find out how to enter a general comment or message to the Slashdot community.
With a succinct heading. This might result in a thread, but most likely not.
Seriously. I think such should be explained, or at least in the "help" bit, if there is any.
Don't expect any help from Linux people.
In my experience they are agressively RTFB. Even there is no FB.
Unless people can do this, it's going to get a bit fetid in there (here?) isn't it?
Or is it already?
I get the impression this is a closed group of gentlemen generating moisture and excitement by some sort of rubbing between their loins.
Cheers, Robin
Wireless technology will never be as reliable and secure as wired technology. Wired tech has the problem of being too simple ("un-fancy") to be sexy. Look at all the crap that WLAN promised like "no more network cables in your office" and stuff. So what? You need a power cable and some others too, so why bother? WLAN is slower and more insecure that a simple network cable and to make up for it, it is more expensive and and emits microwave energy too! Wow, now you little customers RUN TO THE SHOP AND BUY this new crap technology.
Okay, it has its place for cheap long-range connections and simple network access for guests.
Now RFID. It MAY in some years do what it promises, IF they figure out how to talk to one chip among some hundreds in presence of RF noise. I don't think RFID is the only solution to the "inventory problem"... It is the solution that looks simple to managers because they don't know a thing about technology.
RFID will not be able to replace counters because you could put small and expensive products under a tin foil hat(TM). And heck, is it impossible to use barcodes for inventory? Sometimes, nothing beats organization and planning. Sure it is "simpler" to rely on funky technology.
If the supplier wants to cheat you, he can stick some additional chips anywhere on a pallet. What do you do if a tiny chip falls off in range of your reader antennas? What if packaging material with a metal layer (anti-static, tetrapak, cans) shields the signal? This is stupid technology for stupid people.
Think.
Sooner or later, RFID is going to be a reality in Walmart, with other retailers to follow. Why? Because Walmart is the 800 pound gorilla of the retail world. And what the gorilla wants, the gorilla gets. Its only a matter of time. Resistance is futile.
The lead-in for this story made it sound like suppliers are standing up to Walmart on philosophical grounds, when nothing could be further from the truth.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I don't know who picked out the equipment for the self-checkouts at Walmart, but it's gotta be the worst available. Mis-scans constantly, thinks stuff is not in the bag when it is, made for midgets. (I'm 6'5" and it's a major pain after bending over the 50th time to put a single jar of babyfood in the bag that's only two feet off the floor.) And nothing like standing in line for 10 minutes just to watch the person in front of you have to get the attendant over three times in a row just to get one item scanned.
:) ) at Krogers/Bakers grocery stores. The Kroger scanners ROCK! They work pretty much flawlessly. The bagger is at a more realistic height (rather than assuming that EVERYONE is in a wheelchair), and you don't stand in line for 10 minutes just to watch the person in front of you have to get the attendant over three times in a row just to get one item scanned.
Between either waiting in line for a "real" (attended) checkout lane (Which there are less and less of since cheap walmart is pushing everyone to the self-checkouts) and waiting in line for the crappy self-checkout to work, I am seriously attempting to avoid Walmart whenever I can lately. It's too big of a pain in the ass. It takes 2 minutes to get into the store, pick up the few items I need (I'm talking about man-type shopping, not female shopping where they stare at everything and take hours to pick up a few items), then stand 10 to 15 minutes just to pay for it.
I think that if it takes longer to pay for it than to find the item and walk to the checkout, it should be free. I don't have time to stand around because Walmart is too damn cheap to make it convenient to do business with them.
Compare to the elf-checkout (er, that should be Self-checkout
How about a tinfoil wallet? One pocket in the wallet is protected from reading RFID's, another is "public" - so you get to choose ona card by card basis which ones a random person can have.
:)
What if you walked into a fancy restaurant and they scanned you on the way in, realized you had on Walmart underwear, and refused to serve you? "Excuse me, sir, but we don't serve your kind here.
That would be pretty absurd - who cares what underwear you're wearing? The credit card scenario is less absurd, but that's why they go in the tinfoil wallet
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
My company designs and sell equipment to the producers of corrugated and solid fiber packaging. We don't deal with the IT aspects of RFID. However, there are a number of implementation issues which are affecting this part of the supply chain.
Increasingly, recycled paper fibers are being used to make boxes in the U.S. Some of that is scraps or mistakes from the box plants, some is recovered material.
This stuff is dumped into a chemical bath to seperate the paper fibers, adhesives, inks, etc. then run through various filterations to make sure only the paper fibers are recovered. That's one big part of the problem. RFID tags aren't necessarily removed. They must be large enough that they won't slip through with the paper fiber. If they do go through, the paper will be messed up which can damage the machinery which works with it and also the tags might still be active.
Another issue is related to signal strength and resiliency. There's been work with conductive inks. The idea is to print an antenna pattern on the inside of a box to which the RFID tag is attached. This is supposed to help the tag have a greater detection range. However, regulations and technologies for using conductive ink are different than regular inks. Metallic inks are powdered metal suspended in a carrier. Those little pieces of metal aren't as easy to flush from printing machines as clay or organic-based colorants.
There are also stringent regulations concerning the manufacture of paper products used for foods and medicines. They cannot exceed very minute limits of metallic content. Little specs of metal can come from the automatic sharpening of rotary knives which happens during conversion from paper rolls to corrugated or solid fiber board. Imagine the problems which would happen from conductive inks...
Aye, but when all that's left are self-checkouts, I will no longer shop there. I demand to be helped by a live human being. If you're not man (or woman) enough to do business with me face to face, I'll go elsewhere.
I know that they are considered to be top-of-the-pops in logistics, but when you achieve 40% failures in stock maintenance and merchandise flow I wouldn't call that state of the art, I'd call that outright shoddy (even considering that accuracy _might_ get to 95% one day)
By calling up the psychic hotline (9$99 a minute) they probably achieve more accurate results..
(But then again, maybe it's just an engenious way to piss of their suppliers).
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This completely eliminates the advantage for the consumer, which is fast checkout without the hassles of going through a poorly trained human. At Kroger's, for instance, it is perfectly possible to get out of the store without any significant interventions. The few times I have ben to Wal*mart, I have never been able to get out without hassle. Not only do you have the normal thug at the door, but the atttendent seems much more willing to assume malice on the part of the consumer.
I assume that this assumption that most of the customers are thieves derives from the fact that Wal*Mart executives are theives. This would also likely mean that the executive presume tha the suppliers are thieves, which is why every item has to be tagged. The only thins that can be trusted are computers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Grandparent is funny too, but the parent really hit it. Damn I wish I'd thought of that.
Infuriate left and right
Hmm, sounds like your wal-mart as the same self-checkout my local home-depot has, while my local wal-mart has the same ones your Krogers has. (We don't have Krogers in my area so I can't compare).
All I know is with self checkout as Wal-mart I'm in and out, no waiting for the idiot in front of me. Now wondering if the checkout person can scan items with any speed. I only use a human line when the checkout girl is cute enough that it is worth the hassle of a line just to force her to speak to me. (If only the obligatory "did you find everything alright", and "your total is")
Home Depot by contrast has scanners that always are unable to scan something I'm getting. Combine that with the way it forces you to be slow about it. (That is scan one item, put it in bag then wait 5 seconds before it will even register the next item, instead of scanning with one hand bagging with the other)
Not true. Take the check-in machines at airports as an example. I haven't yet encountered the situation that I had to wait for a machine to become available. Normally, less than half are in use. And I won't see that changing when more people are going to use them. It is so much cheaper to add 20 machines than to add even a few "human" check-in counters.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
So here we have an RFID implementation in a controlled environment - one in which everyone is babying the system along and trying to make things work.
If the system is this unreliable in the warehouses then imagine it in the consumer world (ie checking out a whole buggy of products at a time), where the complexity, volume, and general misuse will be amplified. Throw into that mix people actively trying to circumvent or sabotage the system, and things look pretty dismal.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
It's hard to make the case that RFID will help track inventory when you can't reliably find 40% of it."
Sounds like Kmart to me.
I'm not sure from your post if you know, but they are weighing each item after it's scanned. It takes a few seconds for the scale to settle. If you set things down nice, it might even be faster.
New rule: Anything that Wal-Mart wants is inherently evil.
Therefore, RFID must be evil.
Must-not-watch TV!
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?id=2 004122712430002794526&dt=20041227124300&w=RTR&covi ew=
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
That's one thing that people often forget / ignore. Tags are often put in plastic sleeves and can be removed and reprogrammed and slapped on another box / pallet later.
Like you said though, the technology is in its infancy. The problem isn't that there is no standard, the problem is that there are lots of standards, and lots of "additions" to those standards. It's almost like the early days of the web. The tags are the web pages, and the readers are the web browsers. Some "graphic designer" may use a <blink> tag which shows up in Netscape browsers but not in Mosaic.
The companies that make both tags and readers tend to be the worst offenders. They may propose a standard, but it's too easy for them to violate it since the tag team and the reader team both twiddle their products. The purely tag and purely reader companies do a much better job of publishing and adhering to standards.
It's a moving target, and Wal*Mart would be dumb to latch on to any one given tag type or or protocol standard that's currently out there. But Wal*Mart is smart to get in the game early. When all the kinks are worked out, not having to hand-scan every item entering or leaving a warehouse is bound to save lots of dollars.
When I was out Christmas shopping with my brother, he made sure his Canon EOS 1D was out of view before we locked his truck.
Walking across the parking lot, it occurred to me that people who are Christmas shopping quite often have gifts they bought locked in their cars. So all a thief needs to speed his holiday "shopping" is a RFID reader with a directional range extender antenna. Sit it in back seat, perhaps with an accomplice/operator, and cruise up and down the crowded parking lot, pretending to look for a parking space, while actually scanning all the cars. The guy in the back can read off what each car has, and when you find one with lots of pricey gifts, they can stop and break in, or mark it down for later robbery.
For that matter, if the thieves were of more the mugger variety, one guy could sit in a parked car near a mall entrance, and scan the people walking out, and contact the mugger via cell phone telling him who to target.
And I am sure that is just scratching the surface.
RFID is used for logistical applications. Wal-Mart and the Pentagon have both the largest and most sophisticated logistics organizations in the world (the Matrix). Wal-Mart HQ already records every transaction (250 million) every day in near real-time and they keep the data for 2 years.
In the sense that capital seeks efficiency through logistics, then Wal-Mart executives, being true devotees to profit, will pursue RFID and any other technologies or markets which can be exploited to that end. You may try to argue but capitalism is indeed a religion just like any other.
The Pentagon's logistical operations are on par with Wal-Mart but the center of attention is not profits it is purely materiel. Ammo, food, boots, chem suits, laser sights, personnel, armor vests, etc. Suffice to say the Air Force isn't going to put an RFID on an F-16 or it's payload. However, a lot of night vision goggles turn up missing and they must protect that materiel from theft.
Back to the Matrix. RFID allows the Machines to increasingly "see" what is going on in the Matrix. When everything is made trackable in real-time then the Machines will have established a "sense" for itself, which is the A.I. I liken RFID to embryonic nerve cells in first stages of development. It is stunning to think then that the most avid pursuit of tech like RFID is being done by the military and inhuman corporations. Technology is evolving thousands of times faster than humans are. Technology is now readying to sever the natural connectivity between earth and humanity while simultaneously constructing alternative means of filtering us out of reality. Thus, you become a number, THX-1138.
Think different. Corporations are non-living persons, under the law, which pay living persons (i.e. humans) to perform functions for the benefit of the corporations. It is multi-ironic that corporate executives call employees "most valued assets", "cost per units", "human resources", etc.
Wake up. And keep waking up. And waking up again.
Obviously, I'm using technology to post this. I am however noticing that humanity is often left out of the technology conversations. There are some writers/thinkers having a difficult time translating this down to street level users.
Wal-Mart self scanners are slow and suck horribly, but someone thoughtfully included a 'Skip Bagging' button which you can press if your scanning station is being picky with your items. If more people used this, the lines would move much faster.
"The other issue is trust. When allowing a consumer to check themselves out, there has to be some level of trust, or, alternatively, a significant tolerance for shrinkage."
Well, I think Kmart (or is that SMart?) stopped using self scanners precisely because of skrinkage. And the demographics probably aren't much different...
I guess I am rather amused. I wonder if they will really save any money (will the increased skrinkage rate be less than the assumed cost savings for RFID tags). Or do they trust their RFID tags/customers more than their cashiers (I don't think I want an answer...) I suspect these are real issues. It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall. Or is each unit trying to save money regardless of the impact on the other or ooh, look, shiny tech, it will save money?
It did predict some sort of embedded identification system known as "The Number of the Beast"
blah blah blah. People have been saying that some new thing "is the sign of the Beast!" every couple years for the last 2000 years. RFID is merely the latest.
Yawn.
> made for midgets.
Because it is. I worked for a company that made self-checkout equipment that was forced out of business because of fines from the federal government. We designed our equipment for a woman 4' 6", but that still wasn't short enough to make the government happy. The "Americans with Disabilities Act" has made many kinds of equipment difficult to use for 99.9% of people.
Aside: my new employer spent about 70% of our seed money on updating our offices to comply with the ADA. We didn't expect to have to spend a penny, so this huge unnecessary expense will put us out of business unless things go unexpectedly well.
I'm actually an employee, and let me tell you that the inventory system in place is pure junk. Although I'm sure we'd all love a new wonderful technology to help take care of the current problem(and it is a problem for productivity and thus price of product), we're definately doing better than 60% right now, I'd say closer to 80%. But is that really good enough for the world's number one retailer? I, and every single one of my fellow employees and managers, don't think so.
---Excuse the bad English, I'm American---
There's a contactless transit pass being deployed in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota called the "Go-To Card." I'm not sure if it uses RFID or not, but the idea is very similar, at least. According to one report I read earlier this year, there have been lots of problems with getting the cards and the card readers to stay synchronized. Often, only one of the two devices would show that the card had been used to board. The people working on it have basically called it "s software problem" but there might be fundamental issues with their hardware. I don't know if there are fundamental problems with RFID or not, though there might be.
Are you aware your RFID can be read up to 17 feet away from you? Are you aware that they identify you to the store when you walk in, so that they can not only tell what shoes and clothes you are wearing, when and where you bought those products, what other stores you shop at, but which credit cards you used (or whether, the horror, you used.... CASH!!!!).
The supposed benefits? They can target coupons specifically to you based on what they know of your buying habits.
It is documented that RFID/shopping card stores raise prices, not lower them, after implementation, contrary to their claims. They identify where you are (which might be nice in case someone accuses you of committing a crime during that period, but also makes your location available to big brother in case they want to drag you in).
There is no need to "chip" the people. They are willingly or unknowingly doing it by buying products from companies that don't think you have a right to know. Many shoes have RFIDs in them, as do clothing, in the seams, as well as womens underwear and other products.
To counteract this trend, I recommend people engage in what I call "delousing". As RFIDs are specialized sorts of electronic 'bugs', which are implanted in clothes seams (where lice hide), I propose that RFIDs be nicknamed "lice" and the practice of shielding, burning out, or removing RFIDs be known as "delousing".
Hopefully we'll have some delousing products available soon....the first is an RFID shielding wallet...
Mike Lorrey, founder YNGVE Delousing Technologies
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
as reported on 12/31 on slashdot, anyone forsee custom rfid burners in the future of the scammers' arsenal?
You read it here first on slashdot, again.
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