Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When you sell something, the price is supposed to be a bargained-for negotiation between a willing purchaser and a willing seller. You are buying a product or a service. Tub of popcorn, $2. Tub of popcorn at a movie theater, $6 (but for another 25 cents you can get a jumbo!) The consumer is buying a product, the product has a specified "value," and that transaction is called a sale. And the government gets a slice of that "sale" – maybe 6 percent of the sales price. Sales taxes typically apply to retail sales (merchant to consumer) of non-exempt tangible personal products, and to certain specified services as well.Read more...

The chain may eventually use that data to promote specific products aimed at EV drivers, said Brian Koontz, director of strategic corporate development for Ecotality, which runs the network of charging stations.Read more...

Johnson had already reversed many of his decisions that were the most unpopular with shoppers—including his elimination of sales, discount pricing (including "mark up to mark down") and coupons. And then there's Johnson's beloved shops-within-the-store concept—which isn't likely to be reversed, mainly because it was originally the brainchild of a former Sephora executive with a familiar name: Mike Ullman.Read more...

The precise methodology of the accused thief, Mark A. Douglas, is not clear, but he apparently created a list of Macy's account holders and then used various techniques to learn their Social Security numbers. Making the false identifications—with the real shopper's name and a picture of Douglas—seems to have been the easy part. Although sophicated cyberthief techniques could have been used to create that list of Macy's cardholders, it might also have been done as easily as standing near a Macy's cashier and listening.Read more...

Beyond personalization, there is a very practical reason to insist that companies get on the phone for these deliveries: to force shoppers to listen. On the Web, it's very easy to post all kinds of restrictions ("Must call by 1 p.m." or "We're not responsible for traffic jams or road closures") that shoppers won't read and they certainly won't internalize.Read more...

For the last couple of years, retailers have had this intense love-hate relationship with self-checkout. Chains have touted "customer service" as their reason both for yanking the self-checkout units out and for adding more of them. Higher theft rates have been reported in some stores and not others. Much of it is like any other retail IT deployment, influenced sharply by how much attention is paid to the deployment and how the customers in different neighborhoods — based on demographics — react to the machines. But the idea of requiring CRM to self-checkout is a new twist. Chains — and that's triply true for grocery — have always struggled getting shoppers to use their loyalty cards. To be fair, many of those difficulties have been self-inflicted.Read more...

One of the results of StorefrontBacktalk‘s being acquired back in December is that we are going to be expanding into coverage that goes beyond Retail IT into other areas of retail. The first example of this launched last week and is a daily newsletter and site called FierceRetail.

The site applies the same kind of perspective, analysis and bad jokes that StorefrontBacktalk has always delivered, but we can now explore issues way beyond IT. Consider our coverage of an unorthodox Apple patent, the reasoning behind the Sears Portrait shutdown, why Target’s Manatee mishap is a lot worse than it looked, Samsung’s real retail strategy, why Best Buy and Target’s Geek Squad alliance was doomed and stats showing Visa having all-but-cornered the debit market. It’s all free, of course. If you’d like to sign up, our latest thoughts will be in your Inbox early each morning.…

There are quite a few reasons for the lack of accuracy in these databases. First, loss prevention officers are not there to establish the truth as much as they are there to protect the store brand and the store itself. If no police charges are filed and an associate is simply fired, there can often be an attitude that there's no reason to take a chance once an accusation has been made. Conducting a true investigation is time-consuming, and although some LP officers—especially those with a law enforcement background—have the training to conduct one, few can justify the time.Read more...

When setting policies and when talking with shoppers after a breach, communicating the message that the retailer is the only victim may prove to be self-fulfilling, as you'll quite likely be an imminent victim of lost revenue and thrown-away loyalty. When a crime has been committed, attitude and empathy go a long way — and they are among the hardest things for many chains to deliver.Read more...

The $1,500 necklace was indeed supposed to be marked down, but only to $479, not $47. Things like this happen online with annoying frequency. But in-store? This raises several questions: Macy's described the error as "a mistake [that] was made in a recent Macy's advertisement," according to Holly Thomas, a Macy's VP for national media relations. Was that mistake replicated in the pricing database, accessible through POS? If the wrong price existed only in the print ad, what happened with the checks-and-balances that are supposed to exist in-store? When an associate did a scan and saw $479, didn't a $47 ad activate any alarm bells? No one thought to check with a supervisor?Read more...

In an interesting small piece out of Washington, it was noted that U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had been hit by a credit card breach. It happens. What made this piece interesting is that the Chief Justice was apparently overheard telling his Starbucks barista and his local D.C. barber about the breach, by way of explaining why he wasn’t using his usual credit card.

Our initial reaction was, “How times have changed. It wasn’t that long ago that coffee and haircut payments were almost always done in cash. It’s certainly interesting that he felt the need to explain and justify his greenback move.” But it could have been for other reasons. By the way, clearly, the Chief Justice doesn’t use a Starbucks card or Starbuck’s mobile app. (Just saying.) Could the judge of judges have been trying to let people know that data breaches are widespread and that no one is safe, that if the Chief Justice can

get hit, anyone can? Or maybe these were simply longtime associates and he would have felt the need to explain any change in behavior? (Seems the Chief Justice still has a little pull, as he told those colleagues that the suspect apparently attacked …

But let's turn it around: If a customer isn't a pure-play showroomer who really just wants to see whether that gadget looks cheesy or that blouse is the right color before buying on Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), what kind of in-store technology can help associates do a better job of helping customers find what they want—and convince customers that here and now is the right time and place to buy it?Read more...

QR codes have always been deceptively easy to use, for anyone other than shoppers. Business Insider recently some of the worst QR code deployments it could find and it’s worth a look.

But the retail examples were particularly interesting, such as Subway putting them on employee shirts, which is a place that employees report no one even tries to scan. But our favorite, depicted here, is a sign on how to use QR codes. And to give the lesson? Yep, the shopper has to scan a QR code. …

Wait—isn't losing control of CRM data the biggest reason chains aren't wild about digital wallets in the first place? Wasn't everyone worried that Google might somehow share transaction data with a chain's competitors? Apparently, that fear was well-founded—just misplaced. It turns out the people who will do anything to grab CRM data are the card brands and issuers.Read more...

Given that its program would deliver expensive value in the form of free food and drink at its stores, the first priority of the rollout was to try and discourage fraud. And that involved some creative packaging and identification mechanisms. And a choice to exclude mobile from the launch.Read more...

Customer service is one of the hardest things to reliably, consistently, accurately and—here's the hardest one—meaningfully measure in retail. Other top customer service performers according to the survey are, in order: PetSmart, BJ's Wholesale, Walgreens, AutoZone and Home Depot. Weak performers include: JCPenney, Marshalls, Gamestop and 7-Eleven. (Note: JCPenney has the distinction of being the retailer that suffered the largest drop in customer service ratings from last year to this year. JCPenney dropped 6 percent. The biggest retail gain during the same period? Office Depot (NYSE:ODP), which boosted its score by 11 percent.) Read more...

We're not talking about pirated goods here, but what's often called the "gray market"—legitimate products that aren't authorized for U.S. sale. Those products are usually priced lower, because they're intended for less-affluent markets than the U.S. Costco (NASDAQ:COST)and Kmart (NASDAQ:SHLD) have sold those types of products in the past and gotten into legal trouble. This week's ruling says they won't have that trouble again. But there are much bigger E-Commerce implications in the court's decision to get rid of those geographical limits.Read more...

The decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also flagged to retailers their Achilles heel in such cases, pointing out that the parents' case fell apart when they didn't allege that the store associates had not acted in good faith. In other words, had there been evidence that the associates acted maliciously, things might have gone very differently for Walmart. The parents certainly wouldn't have had difficulty establishing harm that resulted from the associate's actions.Read more...

U.S. and Chinese paper mills say they will eventually fill the shortfall from the U.S. exit of Koehler, which has been providing about 40 percent of POS paper. But in the meantime chain execs may be expecting IT to keep stores from running out of paper. Strange as it sounds, it is IT's problem—and the second-easiest option is digital receipts.Read more...

Grocery—and other food selling—chains that are trying to encourage shoppers to use CRM? Nothing makes customers more loyal than saving their lives. (Yes, Bentonville, even more than saving them money. Sheesh.) With a steady stream of news reports touting loyalty records as key tools in finding and then notifying customers about poisons, CRM should become a much easier sell.

The capabilities and lives being saved by CRM is hardly new. Costco (NASDAQ: COST) has championed it for years, and Safeway (NYSE:SWY) has been sued for not using loyalty to protect shoppers’ health. Grocery, QSR and convenience chains often complain about the difficulty of getting shoppers to sign up for—and to routinely use—their loyalty cards. Instead of pushing savings, maybe this is a much more effective and truly altruistic (well, semi) argument to make. On the flip side, to help government food investigators do this magic, a lot of data will have to be shared. When that data is then shared with other government agencies and a customer is surprised by an IRS visit? Law enforcement has been finding nuggets in POS databases for years. Privacy violation or saving customer lives? The joys of retail decisions.…

Asked about ways to cut labor costs, Galanti went out of his way to dismiss it, arguing that he's not buying item-level RFID's promises. "Everybody thought that RFID would free up the front end and reduce our biggest labor cost area. That ain't happening." (How can you not like a CFO who tells a recorded investor call "that ain't happening"?) Costco has always been the contrarian among the largest chains. Read more...

What's interesting here is why Genesco thinks it will get to take Visa to court: A month before Visa notified the acquirers of the assessment, Genesco signed a separate agreement with one of the acquirers, Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC), in which the bank actually signed over its right to sue Visa to Genesco.Read more...

At KFC, the mobile percentage is expected to be much higher. That's because people typically want pizza delivered to their home or office, whereas a bucket of wings is picked up—after having been ordered from someone driving or walking near the store. (KFC in the U.K. does not deliver.) Pizzas also take longer to cook—compared with preparing already-cooked chicken parts—making the "order and have it waiting for you" model ineffective for KFC. Instead, KFC UK will soon add a geolocation function (likely to be launched in May), so the app knows when the customer is truly right by the restaurant and can ask the customer if the order can be prepared.Read more...

That is already the law outside the United States and Canada, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, and it may already be the law in those two holdout countries. It's a matter of interpretation.Read more...

Today’s frightening question: What happens when your payment processor gets into a legal fight and suddenly can’t process your transactions? This is likely to happen periodically with mobile payments, as patent violations and state revenue rules start to play out. As if to prove that point, Illinois is ordering Square to halt any payments processed within its borders, something that is not likely

to sit well with Illinois Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) fans—nor Starbucks itself, nor any other Illinois Square merchant.

The Illinois cease-and-desist order involves the ghastly accusation that Square has not obtained the proper state license, something that is complicated by the fact that Square is arguing it doesn’t qualify for that particular license. Square has been fighting this battle in other states, too, with varying results. This is just something to remember when mobile processors are pitching their extreme savings. When entering new, uncharted financial waters, the costs get lower as the risks get higher. This won’t likely be an issue in about two or three years. But for now, having one or two back-up processors is probably not a horrible idea.…