Wal-Mart takes on Web bar codes

Wal-Mart takes on Web bar codes



ASSOCIATED PRESS


LITTLE ROCK, Ark., April 16 — The very technology that revolutionized retail checkout - the bar code - is now being subverted by anti-capitalist protesters who fancy themselves cyberpranksters. The activists drew the ire of Wal-Mart Inc., the world’s largest retailer, with a Web site that encouraged people to “name their own prices” by offering hundreds of substitute bar codes.

• Shopping

WAL-MART CONSIDERED the ploy an incitement to theft and sent a cease-and-desist letter dated April 2 to one of the companies that was hosting the Web site, Re-code.com.
Re-code.com’s operators responded by disabling the link on their Web site that allowed users to print sheets with a selection of bar code labels that could be slapped on store items.
“We were advised by our lawyers it would make sense to remove those for now,” said one of the activists, who identified himself only as Nathan Hactivist and responded by telephone to an e-mail request for an interview.
Re-code.com still provides a database of bar codes that can be copied and pasted into printing applications. It suggests, for instance, that users stick a label for Nerf balls over the bar code on a box of rifle ammunition.

Hactivist said he does not know whether anyone has used the replacement bar codes. Re-code’s aim, he said, is to get people to discuss how prices are set. He says Wal-Mart is an appropriate target because of its anti-union stance and the way it crowds out smaller retailers by undercutting their prices.

A satirical video at the site recommends the use of self check-out counters - a relatively new retail phenomenon - to reduce the risk of cashiers noticing the switch.
The site also prominently display’s Wal-Mart’s letter.
Hactivist said he lives in “upstate New York” but refused to be more specific. The Web site is registered to Mike Bonnano in Loudonville, outside Albany, N.Y. Bonnano said he was not among activists who created the site but was willing to risk being its legal owner.
Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams said thieves in the past have used fake bar codes, and that the company does not want people using a Web site to print them onto labels.
Burt Flickinger, head of the retail business consultancy Strategic Resource Group in New York, said that shoplifting and theft by employees is already a huge problem for retail chains, and is part of the reason 15 of the 100 largest retailers have gone bankrupt in the past year.