Response from: Stefan Smalla

Torsten, the Wal-Mart announcement was to stop RFID experiments that directly interfere with consumers. Re. RFIDs in general, especially to improve its supply chain management, Wal-Mart is hugely stepping up to the plate requiring all its important partners to be ready for RFID deployment by 2005. My speculation on the reasons: RFIDs are too expensive right now. Thus, they decided to ride the cost curve a little with a wide deployment among suppliers (which requires less RFID numbers per product because the tags are deployed on the multi-product boxes) and go into consumer deployment once prices are up to snuff.

Response from: TJ

True Stefan. My writing is a bit misleading indeed. It's not stopping all field tests, just the consumer products.
Your speculation seems well grounded. Have you seen Joi's super small RFIDs http://joi.ito.com/moblog/archives/005556.html.
Do you have a price tag for the actually used ones?