Metro Group To Fine Suppliers Who Don’t RFID Comply
Written by Evan SchumanThe Germany-based Metro Group, one of the world’s largest retailers and one of the strongest RFID advocates, has gone into fullscale RFID deployment. But the more interesting news is that Metro has decided to penalize suppliers who don’t properly comply.
“Some sort of levy will be imposed for each non-compliant — that is, untagged — pallet shipped by the supplier to the retailer,” said an RFID Update story. “Exactly what that levy will be is unclear. Industry hearsay puts it at two euros per untagged pallet, but METRO has not confirmed the figure.”
The story pointed out that this is in stark contrast to how Wal-Mart has been enforcing its supplier rules. Wal-Mart’s “RFID mandate was considered aggressive indeed but stopped short of threatening a financial penalty for non-compliance,” the story said.
-Dan Stiel
September 10th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
This is going to be interesting to watch. Of course whether or not mandatory RFID actually gets entrenched in supplier contracts will depend on the next round of contract negociations. Metro Group has muscle with its suppliers, that’s clear, but the cost to suppliers of implementing tagging will be high.