Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club division announced a dramatic drop in its compliance penalties for failure to put RFID tags on pallets sent to its distribution centers.
Initially, Sam’s said that failure to meet these deadlines would result in modest “chargeback” penalties – $2.00 per pallet initially, and $3.00 per pallet in 2009.
Even at these levels, some consumer goods vendors were considering accepting the charge rather than investing in RFID tagging capabilities. The cost, some told SCDigest last year, was not in the tags itself or even the printing equipment, but the process costs and added complexity that the tagging would bring for what most companies is a relatively small piece of their overall business.
Now, Sam’s has dropped the penalty to a mere 12 cents per pallet, reflecting the incremental cost of adding a tag to a pallet that arrives at a DC without one.
Sam’s Club has invested in RFID and related automation in its own DCs, and therefore reached a “tipping point” where it will be much cheaper for it to perform the pallet tagging than it will be for its vendors.
Source: scdigest.com
