Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

While U.S. grocery chains are struggling with whether they’re better or worse off with self-checkout and express lanes, a supermarket in Espoo, Finland, is experimenting in the opposite direction: intentionally slow checkout. Dubbed the “don’t panic” lane, the slow-track checkout at a store in the K-citymarket chain offers armchairs for people waiting to pay, help putting products on the checkout belt and a generally relaxed approach to paying for merchandise.

The pilot project is being done in conjunction with researchers at Aalto University, who thought mentally disabled customers would prefer a less hectic, more helpful checkout process. But it seems elderly customers and even parents with small children in tow also like the slow lane (those armchairs seem to be a big draw in both groups). Running customers through checkout at top speed may be the most efficient way to do it, but an extra-slow checkout offers plenty of opportunities to hit those armchair-bound customers with digital signage and potential impulse items—keeping some customers happier and potentially paying for itself with increased sales. For chains that have already given up on one-size-fits-all checkout, that slow lane might actually make good retail sense.…

Yes, that's what HP needed. But instead of offering the tablet and sled as a general-purpose in-store mobile POS, HP is positioning it largely as an add-on to HP's own POS systems. OK, that limits the market. So does the lack of a clear advantage over an iPad (HP says being Windows-based will make it "easy for retailers to integrate," though a product manager acknowledged that iPads probably work fine with most retailers' systems too). Then there's the mag-stripe reader, which can work right out of the box in unencrypted mode. Wait, isn't that exactly what retailers don't want?Read more...

If that sounds like an afterthought, it very nearly is, even though self-checkout alone would be a big deal for most chains. What Apple is primarily trying to do is demolish the wall between stores and M-Commerce. It may not work—that 12-minute turnaround promise may just be impossible, and some of Apple's plans for prioritizing customers can collapse when things get busy. But if it does work, it may also represent Apple's demonstration of how it plans to offer mobile payments to other retailers—without either NFC or mimicking a plastic card.Read more...

The problem is that the digital wallet concept—a place where you can cram in every payment method, CRM card and discount reminder—is the same, with trivial differences in partners and technology. PayPal did showcase some differentiators—such as the ability to pay with airline miles or other points programs, in addition to changing the payment method days after the purchase has been finalized—but it also conceded that there's nothing preventing Google or ISIS (or Apple or others) from offering identical services.Read more...

The virtual store is not new. In a much publicized trial this summer, Tesco re-created almost all of the merchandise from one of its stores as a series of high-res photographs with QR codes on the walls of a South Korean subway. But the Debenhams' effort takes it farther than any other retailer. At least consumers arriving at that subway would see pictures of products and could guess what to do. In the Debenhams' trial, consumers were directed to very prominent street corners in London (Trafalgar Square), Manchester (Albert Square), Birmingham (Centenary Square), Cardiff (Cardiff Castle) and Glasgow (George Square). They then loaded a mobile app onto their phones. If the geolocation of the phones matched what the app had been programmed to look for, it would display a ghostly image of a dress.Read more...

But there's certainly a difference between a marketing event that begins at midnight and one that starts in the middle of prime time on the West Coast. Last year, Kohl's started its Black Friday sales at 3:00 AM New York time, midnight Pacific time, with Macy's and Target an hour later. That didn't make much of a difference online—it was still late-night across the U.S. But wind those times back a few hours, and suddenly it won't just be night owls who are hammering on E-tail sites.Read more...

Conventional wisdom is that consumer resistance to invasive marketing consistently softens over time with each new retail tech innovation. But the friendly shopkeeper demonstrates that's not a linear trend. And there's a school of thought that says mobile technology may break that trend, too. The potential invasiveness of mobile payments is so intense that customers might rebel and resist all privacy-infringing efforts even more—making mobile dangerously likely to blow up in retailers' faces.Read more...

Several states have laws that restrict either in whole or in part the use of certain personal information as a condition of accepting a credit card, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. The trick, though, is whether to write it down or not. (Hint: You really don't want to write it down.)Read more...

First off, the world's largest retailer is excluding any online sites. Really? In late October 2011, you're still not convinced that E-Commerce isn't just a fad? Second, it's a clever move in that once customers purchase an item from their lists, they are unlikely to continue researching and looking for it.Read more...

By now you’ve probably seen how easy it is to unlock an iPad 2 without knowing the password. Local TV news anchors are having a field day with this one, because even they can figure out how to exploit the hole Apple left in iOS5. It requires using the iPad 2’s magnetic smart cover and about five seconds of poking buttons and covering and uncovering the screen—a truly impressive security fail.

Apple has come up with a workaround (change the smart cover-related settings) and promises a patch soon, but this should still remind retail chains they need to be doing their own security in apps running on in-store mobile devices. Making sure a custom app automatically locks itself when it’s not being used will cost an associate a few extra seconds for one more password, but you really don’t want a thief to walk off with a tablet running a live application that’s connected with your payment or inventory systems. (And if your in-store iPads don’t have their own smart covers? Let’s just say that thieves tend to come prepared.)…

There are two main drivers behind this move. The first is the recent E-Commerce obsession with local: consider Wal-Mart's local Facebook move two weeks ago. But the second issue is the rapid death of many regional newspapers, which are taking to their graves the local circulars. The Sears local move not only enables the chain to migrate many of those local promotions from dead-tree to pixels, but it also is upgrading the experience. Consider a circular where the ads instantly disappear as soon as the product is out of stock.Read more...

"At the scan, we get a certain amount of metadata as a result of the scan itself—operating system, carrier, cell tower being used, etc. We get all of that," said Scanbuy CEO Mike Wehrs. "We know what that app has scanned in the past." Indeed, Wehrs argues, the app can secure data from the QR code plus the phone plus online data accessed from a retailer's loyalty card database. "If the app integrates with their CRM files, it can give a completely customized experience."Read more...

The potential of this microlocation mobile approach is compelling, because it provides a relatively easy—and somewhat accurate—way to help customers find product. Of course, that's not the goal of all chains. Some chains—such as Costco—depend heavily on the customer stumbling on impulse buys as he/she wanders the aisles in search of the elusive clothes pins or peanuts.Read more...

Here’s an IT twist: The $9 billion Whole Foods Market grocery chain is pulling back from accepting checks primarily because it wants to collect less customer data. Making this move even more unusual is that checks—along with cash—have a much higher margin than payment cards due to a delicious absence of interchange.

“We simply don’t want the burden of having all that information,” said Whole Foods spokesperson Libba Letton, adding that it’s the same reason the chain has thus far shunned any type of CRM/loyalty program. That said, there are other more mundane reasons for the 300-store 38-state chain’s rejection of checks, added Letton: “It takes too long, and the financial impact of check fraud.” Also, there’s the fact that the number of consumers using checks at grocery stores is plummeting, so why keep associates trained on something that is so rarely used? Still, the idea of a chain choosing to prematurely halt an interchange-free system that brings in lots of customer data, that’s an unusual kettle of organic steamed fish.…

That crucial point, buried in Yegge's 4,800-word rant: Google (just like most retail chains) has built a company on top of a collection of applications. Amazon (where Yegge worked for six years) has built its enormous E-Commerce success because it is not just a bundle of retail applications. It's a platform that lets customers interact, outside retailers sell and other third parties connect. But Amazon didn't start that way. And how it made the transition should have retail chains thinking hard about whether that's the right approach for them, too.Read more...

Shoplifters and employees who steal are classic in-store loss-prevention problems, but fully one-fifth of shrink is due to administrative errors and supplier fraud—things that LP isn’t designed for but that conventional IT should be a lot better at dealing with. According to the annual “Global Retail Theft Barometer” report out this week from the Centre for Retail Research in the U.K., about 20 percent of shrink worldwide is due to administrative errors (including “pricing mistakes, accounting errors and process failures,” the report says) and fraud or errors by suppliers.

That’s a huge chunk of loss that should be fixable with nothing but better automation. The other 80 percent is predictably split between external and internal theft, though that split varies widely: In the U.S. it’s 36 percent shoplifters and 44 percent employees, while worldwide that’s flipped: 43 percent shoplifting and 35 percent internal theft. But using IT to cut administrative-error shrink has at least one big advantage over Loss Prevention: Those errors aren’t working hard to hide themselves. And if you can use better systems to cut admin-error shrink in half, that’s roughly as good as catching a quarter of your shoplifters.…

The vendor behind the trial, a U.K. firm called Path Intelligence, pledged that "no mobile phone usernames or numbers could be accessed" and that "all we do is log the movement of a phone around an area and aggregate this to provide trend data for businesses." But what if that phone-tracking data is linked with security cameras and/or POS systems? What if a mall representative called one of its retail residents and said, "We're now tracking a woman who has spent $980 in the last hour and she has just walked into your store. For a $300 fee, I'll tell you exactly where she's standing right now. Deal?"Read more...

When customers bring clothes to a dressing room—or even when those apparel items are purchased—there would seem to be a strong chance that the wrong hangers could get associated with the wrong piece of clothing. Attentive associates could painstakingly note the numbers of each identical hanger to make sure one item doesn't get confused with another, but that would seem to demand a sharp labor increase.Read more...

The guidelines, which are generally filled with commonsense security restrictions, offer nothing about timing, schedules or when retailers can—or should—include the new requirements in RFPs. The closest the guidelines get to referencing existing hardware is a brief comment that such components can be reused in newly approved systems. It does, however, detail fees.Read more...

Sears' conservative move makes more sense in the context that many customers may not feel like using their phones while shopping and, more to the point, most American consumers don't yet have smartphones—if you accept the smartphone definition of a phone that can download third-party apps.Read more...

For example: Where should the QR codes be placed? Should it be near the bottom of the screen? Well, what if the consumer time-shifts with a DVR or Tivo? A part of the code could be overridden by screen buttons. Place it in a glossy magazine? Good choice, but you have to steer clear of the page side toward any glued (perfect-bound) gutter or else consumers won't be able to get a full scan of the image.Read more...

Beyond the obvious—strengthening the local friendly face of the neighborhood store—this could alert corporate to stores that are resonating with their audiences and those that are not. It's not unusual for chains to allow specific stores to have very different product mixes based on the manager's read on local customers. In turn, this could enable those differences to be much more pronounced than is practical today with a single walmart.com site. This all presumes, though, that customer interactions with local Facebook sites—especially as measured by the number of "likes" a site gets—is a meaningful metric. That's far from being a given.Read more...

It's a classic single-point-of-failure problem, and it could be frighteningly disruptive—especially since this holiday season will be the first at many stores with lots of in-store mobile devices in use, and almost all retailers are using Wi-Fi to keep them connected. A saboteur who uses a pocket-size jammer wouldn't have access to payment-card information, but what's supposed to be an impressive demonstration of retail technology would just irritate customers and frustrate associates—especially during the high-volume times that mobile POS should be a relief. And that's just from an intentional saboteur. Unintentional Wi-Fi jamming could have even worse effects.Read more...

There are lots of reasons for that: IT shops have bad memories of having to run proprietary RIM servers to support BlackBerry users. RIM's periodic network outages (such as the one slowing E-mail delivery and choking BlackBerry Internet access this week) give retail IT plenty of reason to hope payments will never depend on RIM. And although iPhones are sexy and Android phones are at least gadgety, BlackBerrys—until recently—looked downright clunky. But with a growing consumer fan base spearheaded by BlackBerry Messenger users, along with actual experience doing mobile payments, retailers may have to bite the bullet and accept that RIM is going to be a payments player in the U.S., too. The question is, how soon—and then how?Read more...

Retailers are starting to outrun Google when it comes to Google Wallet. On Tuesday (Oct. 11), the $334 million Peet’s Coffee chain announced that, by the end of October, it will upgrade POS devices to accept Google Wallet payments at all 193 company-owned stores—not just the ones in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., where Google Wallet was officially rolled out in late September. Peet’s is working fast—American Eagle Outfitters didn’t even officially launch Google Wallet in the target cities until Wednesday (Oct. 12), although AEO actually had it working in some stores a month ago.

If Google was hoping for an orderly Wallet rollout, it may be out of luck. There’s only so long the window will stay open for retailers to look cool by offering mobile payments—once customers get used to it, Google Wallet will be more useful but not nearly so interesting. That means at least some smaller retailers may be in a race to get Google Wallet running in as many locations as possible, never mind Google’s plans. And once retailers, not Google, are calling the shots on the mobile-payments rollout, that’s control that Google may never recapture.…