Walmart Will Tag Jeans and Underwear with RFID

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will start tagging garments, specifically jeans and underwear, with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips beginning August 2010. The effort is seen as a test of item-level tagging, and if successful, Walmart is expected to widen its RFID initiative to other products at its stores.

According to an article appearing in the Wall Street Journal, Walmart's goal is to get a better handle on its in-store inventory by being able to identify the whereabouts of products anywhere in the store. "This ability to wave the wand and have a sense of all the products that are on the floor or in the back room in seconds is something that we feel can really transform our business," Raul Vazquez, the executive in charge of Wal-Mart stores in the western U.S., told the WSJ.

The cost of the RFID implementation was not disclosed, although Walmart did confirm to the WSJ that it will subsidize some of the tagging costs to its suppliers.

In 2003, Walmart announced it was going to launch an item-level test of RFID technology using razor blades from Gillette Co. However, in part due to pressure from privacy groups, the retail giant abruptly cancelled those plans. Similarly, that same year garment maker The Benetton Group said it would purchase and fit 15 million RFID tags into its apparel, but then quickly reversed course and cancelled the project. To this day, Benetton's website insists the company has no plans to use RFID.