Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

As assistant director of information systems for the $700 million Piggly Wiggly grocery chain, Rachel Bolt has been one of the most vocal proponents of biometric retail authentication systems. At Piggly Wiggly, that system—like almost every other retail biometric system being tested today—is based on fingerprints.

But although Bolt saw initially strong consumer interest and support for the system, that support has lately seen a serious drop.

Bolt said she didn’t appreciate how emotionally intense some of the opposition was until she visited a store and saw a 70-year-old woman literally throw a Bible at an employee trying to enroll people in the program.

“She told him that God was going to rain hellfire on him and that he was promoting the devil’s work,” Bolt said, adding that she took that to mean the customer was not interested in enrolling.

When Piggly Wiggly, which has 114 stores in South Carolina and Georgia, first launched its biometric program in the first half of 2005, it was one of the industry’s largest commitments to retail biometrics, and is therefore being closely watched.

“We piloted it in four stores and it worked out extremely well,” Bolt said. “The rollout to the entire chain, however, did not go nearly as well as we expected.”

The 70-year-old customer was reacting to the concern of some in the religious community that RFID (radio-frequency identification) and biometric programs are similar to a Bible story known as “the mark of the beast.” The story from Revelation speaks of limits to sales or purchases “save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

Katherine Albrecht is a consumer privacy advocate whose book “SpyChips” discusses privacy concerns about RFID. Albrecht also lectures about the Mark of the Beast in relation to retail identification issues.

In the Bible, “This mark is specifically described as being in the right hand or in the forehead. Fingerprint systems like [the one being used at Piggly Wiggly] clearly do not meet this definition,” Albrecht said.