What business wants an extra 100,000 pesky customers tromping through its stores on a daily basis?
The RFID Journal reports in “RFID and Global Warming“:
… Wal-mart has estimated that inventory management through item-level RFID tagging within its stores has the potential to eliminate extra trips for 100,000 customers daily — customers who would otherwise seek products elsewhere. The retailer has calculated that this would result in the elimination of 80,209 metric tons of CO2 per year…
FYI, 80,209 metric tons of CO2 amounts to about 0.00027% of annual manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.
The only real uncertainty is finding what you were looking for at walmart.
No doubt some marketing idiot came up with “80,209 metric tons”. The precision is a dead giveaway. If they had said approximately or roughly 80,200 metric tons you would at least know the number reflected the unavoidable uncertainty in the calculations.
Putting 0.00027% into perspective, that still seems like a whole lot of self-importance. That much of world wide CO2 emissions comes from Wal-Mart customers making “extra” trips to the Wal-Mart? World wide, I would think that extra trips to Wal;-Mart account for 0.00027% of world-wide shopping trips. Of which shopping trips comprise 0.01% of CO2 emissions. Maybe I overstate my case by a factor of 10, but come on. They’re trying to claim they’re as valuable as an Al Gore manufactured carbon indulgence. And nothing’s more valuable than that.
They might consider keeping their shelves stocked with things we use instead of pulling everything to make room for the “hot specials”. It would cut down on our trips to other stores or 3 or 4 return trips to try to find it there.