Wal-Mart advertisements have always boasted about the retailer’s ability to “roll back prices” on its merchandise. A yellow smiley face usually accompanies the catchphrase and provides a comforting message to customers. “Ahhh, the smiley face. I know I’m gettin’ a good deal!”

But not all is so comfortable these days inside Wal-Mart’s fortified headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. For starters, the familiar cacophony of anti-Wal-Mart sentiment (protesters, industry watchers, the media) seems more fervent than ever. And a nasty and embarrassing scandal involving a former IT worker who is revealing all kinds of company secrets of how Wal-Mart runs its internal IT and physical security efforts is adding more fuel to the anti-Wal-Mart fire that seems forever ablaze. (Kind of like one of those fires that runs amok at landfills or where they throw away old tires--it just smolders forever looking for the next spark, and stinks to the high heaven.)

It also appears that Wal-Mart is “rolling back” the expectations on its much heralded, revolutionary and nearly religious adoption of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in its store and supply chain operations. (No smiley face here, sadly.)

A recent Computerworld article broke the bad news from Bentonville: the retailer failed to meet its own plan for setting up RFID systems in its distribution centers. In a rare acknowledgement of defeat, Wal-Mart said in the article that it didn’t meet its goal of having RFID up and running in 12 of its 137 massive distribution centers by year-end 2006. The RFID focus was now more on the stores and not the DCs. Wal-Mart claimed that it would have RFID systems operational in 1,000 of its stores by the end of this month. The store-level views, a spokesperson said, were more important than distribution center data. One RFID analyst seemed a little perplexed by the change in plan.

The thing is that RFID’s adoption, in general, has now become so intertwined with Wal-Mart’s adoption, in particular, that RFID will now only be as successful as Wal-Mart wants it to be. And that’s pretty powerful. And pretty scary. In a March column, NetworkWorld’s Howard Anderson theorized that there’s roughly $1.3 billion invested in 65 venture-backed companies that were banking on RFID’s future successes. If you were one of those 65 companies, you would be praying that Wal-Mart keeps moving full steam ahead with its RFID

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