NYT: Wal-Mart Slows RFID Plans, Suppliers Resist 188
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."
so who benefits more (Score:2, Informative)
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
Roles reversed (Score:5, Informative)
cough, sorry
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Informative)
RFID is not cost effective and is very problematic (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Wait... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Am I the only one who likes RFID? (Score:5, Informative)
There are a lot of reasons for consumers to not want RFID tags.
Perhaps, but you can't really think effectively about this with as much confusion about the technologies as you have.
Would you want to literally broadcast the fact that you had thirteen platinum Visa cards in your wallet?
So, your hypothetical barroom scanner must:
I think he'd be better off looking at your clothes and car to see how much money you have.
There are also other privacy related reasons you might not want RFID tags in your clothing. 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?
Well, retailers who plan to use RFID (and these are RFID tags, not smart cards) also plan to deactivate the chips at the checkout stand. Among other things, that will allow them to identify items that have been stolen, rather than purchased.
Or, would you want that restaurant to throw you out before they seated you because they saw your Visa cards were maxed out?
In this case the restaurant would have to do everything the barroom scanner would, plus perform a credit check. EMV cards don't provide (don't really even know) your credit balance. I suspect the restaurant's jet-setting clientele would get irritated at all of the extraneous credit queries. What would the restaurant do when someone walks in who has their credit records blocked?
There may be privacy concerns with RFIDs and contactless smart cards, but your examples are both infeasible and, frankly, rather silly.