Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

On Tuesday (Oct. 19), Wal-Mart agreed to pay the State of New Jersey $775,000 to settle charges that it sold infant formula and non-prescription drugs beyond their marked expiration dates and that items on sale scanned at incorrect prices. The chain also agreed to try really hard to not get caught doing it any more.

Even though Wal-Mart is one of the few businesses that could honestly consider a $775K payment a nuisance settlement (one where its legal and related costs would far outdistance the cost of just writing the darn check), it underscores the ROI value of automating price-check and expiration dates This is one of the areas where the upcoming G2 barcodes should help: By adding the expiration date to a product’s data, expired items will be caught at the POS. Until then, consider the size of this fine—and the fact that it covers only one state, with 49 more in the U.S. alone. (Note: Target was also a defendant in this action, but it settled last year for a mere $375,000.)…

Surveillance video isn’t just for spotting what happens inside a store these days. It can also be used to establish what didn’t happen. This month, a Burger King franchisee used footage to knock down a lawsuit claiming that an unwrapped condom had been included in a Whopper. Carrols Restaurant Group was sued in 2007 after a customer claimed he bit into his Whopper and found the condom. But after Carrols came up with video tracing the burger’s assembly—with not a condom in sight—the customer dropped the suit.

In fact, “what didn’t happen” might be the next big thing in retailer video. Amazon has a patent on using digital video to make sure shipments aren’t mispacked, and several chains have tested video systems that let store security quickly spot missing children who haven’t been abducted (they’re usually just lost or hiding). But what about reviewing video to identify displays that don’t attract shoppers’ attention? Or to spot products that multiple customers put in their carts and then decide to return to the shelf? Catching shoplifters in action is fine—but video of what’s not happening could end up being even more useful.…

The Macy's crash itself was unremarkable, having lasted barely an hour on a Sunday morning (Oct. 17), which is how all well-mannered outages should behave. Site visitors were shown a screen with a headline warning of a "temporary shopping jam" and a message that blamed the difficulties on "heavier traffic than normal." More interestingly, though, the screen had a striking 10-second countdown animation, with visitors instructed to wait 10 seconds and then refresh. But that refresh might need to be done a few times.Read more...

At first glance, the Best Buy Commerce API program doesn't look that different from its earlier API efforts or from API moves by other chains. And even Best Buy's official line about the program—"we'll connect with customers wherever they are"—has a deeply innocuous element. But there's much more to it.Read more...

The problem for alternative payments isn't just doing the things that conventional payment cards do at lower cost. It's also breaking through the lack of familiarity that customers, banks and even retailers have with new payment approaches. Visa and MasterCard remain in the POS driver’s seat because of their network, but also because they're a known quantity. And as much as retailers want cheaper alternatives, the Bling Nation/Fifth Third deal illustrates how much of a challenge it is to buck the current infrastructure.Read more...

The action began last Thursday (Oct. 7) at the Wal-Mart in Alliance, Ohio, when two sisters from Cleveland—Katurah and Staniel Petty—visited. The pair went to the back of the store, selected two higher priced pieces of software and "concealed them behind a large purse in the [shopping] basket," said Alliance Police Lt. Kevin Moore, who later saw the pair's activity on the store's video system. The Pettys then tried exiting the store without paying and the theft-detection system was activated. (Stick with me on this one. It gets a lot better.)Read more...

PCI Columnist Walter Conway asks: Can this powerful emerging technique simplify retailers' PCI compliance to the point of it being a minor annoyance? That seems to be one of point-to-point encryption's promises, but how much it and the others are realized depends greatly on each retailer's internal processes and requirements. Read more...

Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud argues that a chain's commitment to making customer comments public—before knowing what that feedback will be—says so much about its confidence in quality. Isn't showing this transparency through unedited real-time feedback what social networks are all about?Read more...

If Halloween is a mere two weeks away, then it’s time to start hearing about the holiday-themed retail tech rollouts. And on Tuesday (Oct. 12), ToysRUs, Amazon and Debenhams stepped up to the brightly colored—and undoubtedly Wi-Fi-connected—plate. ToysRUs is adapting the wedding registry kiosk for the holidays, dubbing it a Wish List, with gift-givers able to access gift lists as long as they have the Wish List number. A nice touch from the toy chain: “Registrants do not have to worry about keeping receipts in the event they wish to make a return or exchange an item in-store that was purchased from their Wish List. Store employees can look up any Wish List transaction simply by revisiting the purchase history on the registrant’s list for easy returns.”

And Santa’s mobile app developers were hard at work at Amazon and over at Debenhams (the second-largest department store chain in the U.K.). Both retailers Tuesday released the same new functionality for their iPhone mobile app: barcode scanning. Debenhams said its move makes it the first High Street retailer to offer mobile barcode scanning. Amazon’s move is surprising in how late it is. But it’s safe to say that eBay’s June purchase of Red Laser helped to focus Amazon on offering an alternative.…

Todd Ablowitz, payment consultant and president of the Double Diamond Group, suggests that PayPal's check-capture-smartphone move—which puts it following financial old-timers including Chase Manhattan and USAA—makes it not such an upstart after all.Read more...

The program, called FedEx Site to Store (every so often, marketers throw us a curve and go for WYSIWYG naming. PayPal did something similar last week), has been piloted by Wal-Mart for months in Los Angeles and Boston, and this new move sharply expands the trial to New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C.Read more...

The reality is that there are many firms in the tokenization space today, and you cannot count on all of them being around forever. Some will change business focus, go out of business or be acquired. Because there are no standards for tokens across vendors, transferring to another vendor could be difficult, pens PCI Columnist Walt Conway. That means retail CIOs need to address what to do if (when?) the unforeseen happens.Read more...

The glitch happened on Oct. 1, but the ill-fated charges were rung up the day before, as is customary. "Settlement processing was delayed by several hours on Friday due to a technical issue. As a result, some cardholders saw duplicate charges and some merchants received duplicate funding for those transactions," said a statement issued by First Data.Read more...

That's reason to worry. Physical tampering with PIN pads is typically local because it's labor intensive. Thieves have to physically modify or replace the card terminals, which is why hacked terminals are usually found in a local cluster. This time there are clusters, all right—10 of them, stretching from Illinois to Georgia. Meanwhile, part of what made this $70 billion global grocery chain so successful could be playing a key role in making it a cyberthief target today: The scarcity of employees in the store.Read more...

We are witnessing a race that will determine the success or failure of many Quick Service Restaurants' rewards programs, pens Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud. On one side, we have the socially enabled "check-in" applications like Foursquare and GoWalla, where friends share their location and compete to earn badges. On the other side, we have brands trying to offer perks through these applications. Today, these perks are inconsistent, in terms of both which locations offer them and the value they provide to customers. If the industry as a whole doesn't start to provide consistent value to the consumer through these new tools, I think the social aspect (the game) may pass by as nothing more than a fad, leaving brands right where they started.Read more...

That's a key problem with tying your loyalty or rewards programs to an outside company, especially a quickly rising startup with inevitable growing pains. From the point of view of your customers, when they check in with Foursquare at your store or restaurant, they're checking in with you. And if Foursquare is unresponsive, you're the one who will get blamed.Read more...

Frustrating for contactless proponents, the more trials that happened, the further in the hole they found themselves. Even retail participants were often resistant, having to be have been bribed into doing the trial at all. But a pair of recent mass transit uses of contactless—an existing trial in New York City and an imminent changeover in Chicago—have a surprisingly good shot at finally giving contactless payment a real shot at success.Read more...

The only price in this Faustian deal: You need to let your customers take the signs home with them, after they've paid you $40 or more for the privilege.Read more...

In an tactic that we'll refer to as the nesting doll attack—named after the Russian nesting dolls, which include increasingly smaller dolls hiding yet smaller dolls—one Nevada would-be-shoplifter decided that a legitimate barcode matching to a legitimate product was sufficient to escape suspicion.Read more...

Wal-Mart won't explain exactly what happened. That's partially because the chain itself hasn't completely determined what happened, with an internal investigation underway. Whatever precisely caused the glitch, it had two elements. The first was an electronic system problem. But that wouldn't have shut everything down had it not been compounded by an employee's ill-fated—albeit well-intentioned—attempt to manually fix the issue.Read more...

According to the draft of the PCI changes that the PCI Council has been circulating for comment, there are indeed no major changes in next month's updated standard. But as they say in Purchase, the CVV devil is in the details. Read more...

Critics of Chip-and-PIN have raised questions about whether EMV is honestly that much more secure than mag-stripe. These concerns mushroomed back in February when a Cambridge University report publicly detailed many security holes in the current implementation. Even worse, some have suggested the U.S. shouldn't embrace Chip-and-PIN because it will likely be years-beyond-obsolete by the time it's fully launched.Read more...

Eddie Bauer, for example, completed the transaction, took the money and never sent the card. Two others also never sent the card, but at least had the decency to not charge for it. RSR Managing Partner Nikki Baird said Eddie Bauer's people admitted that they never shipped the card.Read more...

How can you make sure you don't get round dusty minerals that are overpriced and provide about as much true data security as a Jack-O-Lantern? PCI Columnist Walter Conway, in an eerie voice, bellows that it all comes down to knowing which houses to go to and which to avoid. Even more importantly, it's about knowing which questions to ask.Read more...

The real danger here, he writes, is that the larger NFC value proposition might be poisoned if NFC is pigeonholed as just another card replacement. If that happens, it would effectively kill retailer and consumer adoption.Read more...