Wireless at Wal Mart

[Ollie03031]

I had seen postings that Wal Mart had WiFi but did not really believe it. I purchased one of the Kingston key chain sniffers and the other day while my wife was shopping in Wal Mart I check it out. Sure enough the Wal Mart in my town does have WiFi. The question is, is it free to use by anyone? I asked in the customer service dept. but they did not even know what I was talking about. I have never seen anyone walking around in Wal Mart with a laptop or Pocket PC getting their email or surfing the net. Has anyone ever tried WiFi at Wal Mart? I am ready to expirement but would rather not get thrown out of Wal Mart for messing up the inventory system or something.

[dh]

Wal-Mart use mobile scanners and printers for the shelf labeling in their stores so what you found will be their wireless network. I'm sure it would be very secure, but you never know......

[Glohamar]

You know what I think would be really cool. The Wal-Mart I shop at is always moving grocery items around from one isle to another, and sometimes even the merchandise (clothes, audio/video, games). It is due to whichever holiday it is, so sometimes it happens on a month-to-month basis. Sometimes when I ask for help, the personal does not even know where to look. :roll:

I think that they should have a wireless application that someone could type in what they are looking for and it would either tell what isle the product is in, or a mini-map of the store layout would show you where to go to fine what you are looking for. Of course, I would want to see this application available for Smartphone as well as the PPC. :)

Dave

[Arcticblue]

I know here in Norway they experimented anyway with some SMS stuff so when you walked by a shop or a Bar/pub you would get a SMS message telling you what happend in there or what they had to offer and stuff, it was locally so unless you walked by and you had sign up for their offer or something you would not get that information.

I could see that being developed like so if you had a PPC in a store with wi-fi you could get important messages about different offers and stuff.

[David Prahl]

I've been inside several retairs stores (even lumberyards) that use wireless of some sort. These don't offer Internet access, and are used for point-of-sale, inventory, or other business applications.

I can connect to Office Depot's wireless, but can't do anything with it.

[Jon Westfall]

Coupled with wireless networks for POS, inventory control, and communication in many retail stores are good old-fashion radio networks for employees to use to communicate with each other. As anyone who's ever worked in Retail will tell you - getting a scanner to listen in on those conversations would be far more valuable than any stock location tool ;) I have fond memories of many colorful conversations on those radios about certain customers. I now think that it would be the perfect setup to get a good amount of cash from the media:
1. Purchase radio scanner and mini tape recorder
2. Get Friend
3. Have friend act like complete idiot to store employees.
4. Record massive amounts of insults about friend from employees over radios.
5. Call major news networks, tell them that XYZ Stores aren't as consumer friendly as they'd have you believe.


Anyone want to implement this :)