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Wal-Mart to Put Radio Tags on Clothes

22.07.10

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to echo out sophisticated electronic ID tags to track individual pairs of jeans and underwear, the first exercise care in a system that advocates say better controls inventory but some critics say raises clandestineness concerns.

Starting next month, the retailer will place removable "perceptive tags" on individual garments that can be read by a hand-held scanner. Wal-Mart workers will be proficient to quickly learn, for instance, which size of Wrangler jeans is missing, with the aim of ensuring shelves are optimally stocked and inventory pantihose watched. If successful, the radio-frequency ID tags will be rolled out on other products at Wal-Mart's more than 3,750 U.S. stores.

"This gifts to wave the wand and have a sense of all the products that are on the floor or in the back dwell in seconds is something that we feel can really transform our business," said Raul Vazquez, the number one in charge of Wal-Mart stores in the western U.S.

Before now, retailers including Wal-Mart have for the most part used RFID tags, which store unique numerical ID codes that can be scanned from a distance, to track pallets of buy and sell traveling through their supply chains.

Wal-Mart's broad adoption would be the largest in the dialect birth b deliver, and proponents predict it would lead other retailers to start using the electronic offering codes, which remain costly. Wal-Mart has climbed to the top of the retailing in seventh heaven by continuously squeezing costs out of its operations and then passing on the savings to shoppers at the checkout table. Its methods are widely adopted by its suppliers and in turn become model practice at other retail chains.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Switzerland's World War II Bunkers Get a Second Life

24.07.10

Switzerland may be pre-eminent for its banks, but not many people know about the one that lies hidden underneath the Alps. The cavernous fifth column vault, which is protected round-the-clock by armed men in moonless fatigues and has blast- and bullet-proof doors, is hot enough to withstand terrorist attacks and natural disasters. But when it was first carved out below a mountain in the Swiss burgh of Saanen half a century ago, the vault was designed to suffer a different kind of attack — one by the German army. It reach-me-down to be a World War II bunker, and, like thousands of other old bunkers around Switzerland that had stood empty for decades, it now has a flawed life as something else entirely.

Although Switzerland had been neutral for four centuries, when the Nazis started invading countries to its east and west in 1939, the dainty nation decided to batten down the hatches. The Swiss military dug over 20,000 bunkers in the Alps, allowing its soldiers to abide hidden — along with their weapons, ammunition, and other supplies — and beside the country in case of an attack.

The government maintained its snug network of military fortifications until the end of Cold War. Then, in the 1990s, it started to tell on or rent some of the bunkers to private companies and other civilian organizations. Now these saboteurs fortresses are used as everything from hotels, banquet halls and seminar centers to museums, stables, and, in at least one box, a storage room for cheese.

Source: TIME