Wal-Mart and it's customers

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retail chain has seen so much success in the past decade. Part is due to the pressure they put on manufacturers to deliver products at the lowest price possible, while the rest could be the information which they gather from it's customers. Each week over 100 million people walk in and out of the 3,600 Wal-Mart stores in the United States. This company has access to individuals Social Security nubers, drivers liscence numbers, as well as the consumers seasonal spending habits. To put this in numbers Wal-Mart has 460 Terabytes of information, that is twice the amount of information that is contained on the whole world wide web. Wal-Mart also has the ability to see your motgage amounts, driving records, and creditworthiness. This information is obtained when customers use debit and credit cards, and through the checkout scanners. Wal-Mart considers this information it's number one asset. All of this data is used to enforce greater levels of efficiency through all levels of operations. The main focus of this data is to prevent an inventory problem. Too much or not enough inventory would hurt the companies profits. Some say that in the future Wal-Mart will use its technology to institute scan based trading, in which manufacuterers own each product until it is sold. If Wal-Mart never takes the products onto its books until it is sold it will eliminate one of the companies biggest expenses, inventory costs.