Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Shoppers with RFID-enabled loyalty cards from a chain of Washington State grocery stores get their accounts automatically credited the price difference, plus 1 percent, if products they buy go on sale within a week of their shopping trips. Now there’s an incentive to use the cards. The program is being trialed at the Top Food & Drug chain, which owns 33 supermarkets in Washington and Oregon under the TOP Food & Drug, Haggen Food & Pharmacy and Larry’s Market names.

“If you buy milk for $4 on Tuesday and the provider sells it on Thursday for $3.50, you get an E-mail saying you’ve got fifty cents in your account based on the fact we put this on sale,” said Peter Gruman, president of Accelitec, a vendor involved in the program. “The next time the customer visits the store and taps his loyalty card at the POS, the cashier will see he has fifty cents credit and will ask if he wants to apply it to the sale or let it remain in the account.” The program also provides no-questions-asked automated refunds for products with quality problems. If a loyalty card holder finds the milk was sour, he can call the store and ask for a refund, which will also be credited directly to the CRM card.…

Macy’s and J.C. Penney apparently let their lawyers loose on a recent batch of consumer coupons, with some wonderfully unintentionally humorous results. And The Consumerist, now owned by Consumer Reports, had more fun than any media outlet should be allowed to have. With Macy’s, it was an impressively lengthy list of exemptions that merited the attention.

The list of exemptions on J.C. Penney’s coupon was much shorter and they probably would have been left alone had some marketer not insisted in a bold coupon declaration of “No exclusions” right next to a healthy list of exclusions.…

But from a strategic marketing perspective, Calvin Klein's approach-avoidance relationship with E-Commerce and New Media is fascinating. They waited more than a decade to get into E-Commerce, even though they wanted that audience. Even when they did launch, they're hesitant to go mobile and social. And yet, this is the same fearless company that pushed the envelope—many would say blew past that envelope—of good taste in X-rated advertisements, trying to stir up attention among younger consumers. That's fine, of course, but it hardly fits the profile of a brand that is scared to move into mobile and social in 2009.Read more...

Typically, statements announcing such deals (which, in this case, included Subway's acquirer for its stores in Canada, Chase Paymentech) feature a canned quote from an executive with the chain, praising the vendor for their wisdom. In this case, the quote provided by Subway was anything but warm. Read more...

It is true that discovery can be frightening for typical companies involved in class-action civil lawsuits, but for TJX, it can be positively terrifying. Throughout two trials, TJX showed itself to be far more worried about revealing thus-far-unreleased security details than monetary payments or almost anything else.Read more...

One reader argued that Fifth Third's resistance had much less to do with making life easier for retailers and more to do with minimizing the processor's own liability. "Fifth Third sees a major transfer of card fraud liability shifting exclusively to them from the merchant who traditionally has (effectively) 100 percent of the liability. This dynamic would leave Fifth Third (and all acquirers) as the sole liability holder for all card fraud," wrote one reader. "I can understand their concern. It is rational and it is well-founded."Read more...

When we recently suggested that E-Commerce sites should do more to facilitate brick-and-mortar purchases, reader feedback brought an interesting take. Is it true that many C-level executives don’t focus on the details enough to support a thoughtful merged channel approach?

If true, is this a key factor in pushing E-Commerce execs to not push proper initiatives to help the overall business? The thinking: “If I’m only going to get credit for purchases made in my channel—regardless of how many sales I deliver to the overall chain—why bother?” This would suggest that the lack of such programs might be much less insulated E-Commerce execs than attention-lacking C-Levels. Something to chew on…. …

But the key issue has consistently been much simpler. Unlike other forms of consumer-issued RFID devices—such as EZPass and even the keyless entry systems of some newer cars—typical contactless payment methods have not given consumers any real reason to use them. With no significant convenience or cost-savings issue, one need not look too far to figure out why contactless is struggling in many sectors.Read more...

This leaves open the question of whether Macy's is refusing to turn the files over for legal—or other—reasons or if it simply cannot access and thereby produce such records, for technological and logistical reasons. But Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Daniel Wright said he is leaning more toward the "won't" as opposed to the "can't" theory, at least for some of the requested records. "It's aggravating," Wright said. "It's inexplicable to me."Read more...

POS shipments to Europe, the Middle East and Africa are likely to decline slightly in 2009 before they begin to grow again in 2010, according to a report from the IHL Group. If IHL’s prediction proves accurate, 2009 will be the second consecutive year POS shipments dropped for EMEA. The region sustained a 3 percent decline in POS shipments from 2007 to 2008, said IHL Group Founder and President Greg Buzek.

“We’re projecting that terminal sales will drop 4 percent this year, but we’re projecting a gain for 2010,” he said.”So we’re basically going to drop to 2005 levels (by the end of this year).” Even so, the POS industry for the region remains healthy, at about $3.2 billion annually, Buzek said.…

Hearing a litany of PCI problems, the U.S. Congress threatened to get involved, passing laws making certain provisions mandatory. Although few retailers argue that PCI isn’t in need of serious help, Congressional assistance wasn’t quite the help desired. It’s akin to calling for help because your basement is flooded and having a tsunami respond. Suddenly, the basement flood looks a lot more tolerable.

On Tuesday (March 31), the House of Representative’s Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing where, according to this detailed report from Forbes, committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson suggested that the PCI rules were written by card companies to shift blame to retailers and partners rather than actually preventing cybercrime. “I’m concerned that as long as the payment card industry is writing the standards, we’ll never see a more secure system,” Thompson said.…

"None of our internal systems will even have access to cardholder data," said McDonalds CIO David Weick. In the U.S., he said, the typical McDonalds brings in about $2.1 million to $2.2 million in revenue per store. "So any solution that I come up with needs to fit within a P&L that starts with a $2.1 million or $2.2 million revenue line. If I come up with something that is way out of line, I have the franchisees who are there to tell me and to describe for me the economics of their business and whether or not it fits," Weick said.Read more...

In the memo, Britton said that the chain disregards its own policies. "What is the first thing we do when a customer comes in to our humble box brandishing a competitor's as asking for a price match? We attempt to build a case against the price match. Trust me, I've done it, too." In a deposition, Best Buy officials tried to blunt the significance of that memo by testifying—and I couldn't make this up—that the employee was just kidding.Read more...

Visa issued a statement "clarifying" their original position, despite the fact that their original position was quite clear. What was so confusing about Visa's original statement that "Heartland will continue to serve as a processor in the Visa system"? Did people think that Visa would tell retailers that a vendor "will continue to serve as a processor in the Visa system" and then turn around and fine—or decertify—them for doing so?Read more...

The Form 10-K also listed a wide range of agencies probing the breach, including what a few whose Heartland probes had not been public. The list now includes the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, the Federal Trade Commission, the Louisiana Department of Justice Office of the Attorney General, the Canadian Privacy Commission and quite a few state Attorneys General.Read more...

When Heartland announced in November that it was acquiring Chockstone, it issued a statement that “Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.” Why do publicly-held companies try such things? They know they’ll likely have to disclose it at SEC filing time.

This week, that filing time came and the Breach Boys had to report that they had dropped some $4.1 million in cash for Chockstone, including $1.6 million in goodwill and $2.4 million in intangible assets. They also took on some $200K in short-term capital lease obligations and about $300K in long-term capital lease obligations.…

Could these be coincidences? Might they indeed be isolated debit card incidents? Absolutely. But this also might be an initial heads up that the debit card system relied on by major retailers today has inherent flaws. What happened, with both Macys and Best Buy, with software specifically designed to look for and prevent these kinds of multiple identical charges? What about the systems at the card processors and the banks?Read more...

She hit Walmart.com and found tons of different printer paper, all of which looked quite acceptable. But she tried one or two and searched if it was in-stock at her store. Nope. She simply wanted to ask the site, "Limiting your answer to this one store, what printer paper does it have in stock?" If she was only interested in one very specific brand and paper type, she could have searched that store. The generic searches made so easy on the site, though, wouldn't work when focused on one store.Read more...

Having gotten that off our product lifecycle management chest, the Tradestone effort does have quite a few things going for it. First, it's A Team list of retailers—including Macy's, Kohl's, Lowe's, Urban Outfitters and Pacific Sunwear--forces it to be taken seriously. Secondly, there has been so little truly accomplished with PLM standardization that practically any effort should be applauded.Read more...

Even more cynically, is it possible that those execs know that surveys like this tend to impact CEO/CFO expectations and, therefore, they'll give the answers they want their CFOs to believe? Even if the execs are being straight with the survey takers—and that the survey takers are being straight in reporting all of the collected data without sanitation—we have to wonder what was behind those answers.Read more...

The researchers predict the U.S. digital signage market — including hardware, software, installation, and maintenance — will grow by about 33 percent this year. "This report was done in the fourth quarter of 2008," noted ABI Research analyst Zippy Aima. "At that time, the economy was not in as dire straits as it is now. We might have to revisit some of the numbers, but despite that fact, we are seeing very promising growth."Read more...

Surveys show the public's lack of enthusiasm for mobile device-based shopping held steady between late 2007 and late 2008. "Consistent from year to year, a little over one-half of all respondents are not interested in using their mobile phones to make purchases," ABI Senior Analyst Jeff Orr said. "Transaction security was cited by 71 percent of mobile phone users as a major concern preventing wider uptake."Read more...

As GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor points out, data security is mostly about FUD. The more you scare people about unknown risks (of breaches, fraud, data loss), the more they tend to spend to guard against these risks. But given the high level of fear that already exists in the SME environment about going out of business, even the loudest and most well justified pitches don't even make the radar screen.Read more...

OK, maybe it's a reach, but not so much as one might think. A study published by Carnegie Mellon University Tuesday (March 3) found that "shopping online reduces environmental impact with 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions compared to the traditional retail shopping model."Read more...

The IHL Group, which conducted the independent research, had expected to find the economic disaster was giving low-cost Linux a boost, but found the opposite, said IHL President Greg Buzek. "This aggressive pricing and packaging of the operating platform not only took share from Linux, but also took a heavy toll on other legacy operating systems as retailers sought replacements as part of their PCI DSS compliance initiatives."Read more...