Wal-Mart Pushing Suppliers For RFID

Weather Storm brings us an InformationWeek article about Wal-Mart's push for suppliers to RFID tag their product shipments. Wal-Mart seems to have lost patience in waiting for its suppliers to adopt the inventory tracking initiative. From InformationWeek: "The retailer says that beginning Jan. 30, it will charge suppliers a $2 fee for each pallet they ship to its Sam's Club distribution center in Texas that doesn't have an RFID tag. The charge is to cover Sam's Club's cost to affix tags on each pallet, says a Wal-Mart spokesman. The retailer hasn't taken such a strong-arm approach yet with the more than 15,000 suppliers that still haven't complied with its request to tag pallets and cases headed for its Wal-Mart stores. Instead, it seems focused on turning its 700-store Sam's Club warehouse-outlet division into an example of RFID supply chain technology in action, down to requiring item-level RFID in 22 distribution centers by 2010."

Comments

RFID and Walmart and more

[Lord Satri]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this seems like the kind of application we should be supporting. I agree, without much analysis, to me it seems Walmart is pushing their partners in the right direction: enhanced efficiency for everyone.

Let me act as a karma whore (not that I care about virtual karma). Last May Walmart was announcing their embrace of the RFID tech, underlining the "green" component of this tech. Then, /. discussed in October Walmart's faltering RFID initiative. (Flash map of Walmart stores) And today, great news, Walmart is deep into RFID. Technology itself is neutral, it is what we do with it that makes it good or bad.

Other RFID stories that I find pertinent: a successful implementation of RFID tags at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Washington Navy Yard. Don't forget we discussed over /. the use by Microsoft of RFID for marketing in groceries. If Microsoft is using it, it must have great potential? ;-) I won't lie that I'm amazed at passive RFID chips being as small as 0.15mm x 0.15mm x 0.0075mm (Hitachi), enabling rather conspiracy-theory applications of the tech. India and China seems are seriously looking at RFID. Well, you get the idea, more stories about RFID here. We live in interesting times. Technology is evolving at an exponential rate... now I wonder if we, as a civilization, will successfully cope with the realities of our resources-limited planet... (I'll stop here, I'm getting off-topic ;-)