Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That's not a big surprise—POS hardware refreshes happen all the time. It's how the news came to light: a Wall Street analyst who took the opportunity of an earnings call on March 1 to complain that his breakfast at Wendy's took too long because it was freshly cooked.Read more...

Retailers have been trying to get that right for years, using a variety of technologies. But if Neiman Marcus' approach works, it may mean that associates and store managers will have to exercise much more discretion and discipline—and that chains will have to change they way they hire associates.Read more...

The implication of the comment was to associate such savings with self-checkout, but the Wal-Mart CFO was careful to not go there. One of the many reasons is that the savings being hinted at are almost impossible to prove, assuming they exist at all.Read more...

Being able to move data around your enterprise gives the most flexibility in using that data, and data portability also future-proofs your system by letting you bolt on new technology quickly instead of slowly and oh-so-carefully making changes to what you've already got.Read more...

But when Vons customer Robert Rivera sued the grocery store after he allegedly slipped on spilled yogurt, the supermarket in litigation called up Rivera's purchasing habits, determined he had purchased "a lot" of alcohol and questioned his sobriety at the time of the accident, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch.Read more...

In Donahoe's case, he has been trying to predict what major retail chains will do. Back in July 2011, he confidently told investors that eBay would have 20 national retail trials in 2012. Last week, Donahoe slashed that figure almost in half, now saying that 10 to 15 retailers will be offering PayPal in-store this year.Read more...

Due to the (strange? pyschotic? drug-induced?) unusual policies at Amazon, publishers have no idea who their Kindle subscribers are. That puts us here at StorefrontBacktalk in the awkward position of having to make a plea to our Kindle subscribers: Please reveal yourselves, and tell us how you find the Kindle subscriptions. We’re considering some changes to the service and any customer feedback goes to Amazon—and it’s not sharing. Therefore, we’re begging for whatever feedback you want to share to please share it with us directly.

For you Kindle people who have not yet subscribed to our Kindle feed, it’s not bad for convenience when traveling, when you’d like the latest on retail tech and E-Commerce beamed into your Kindle when you’re not looking. …

But Visa is offering its new service for any issuing bank, mobile carrier and card brand. That means any payment card could go on a phone without the say-so of Google, ISIS or any other mobile-wallet vendor. At that point, will consumers see any reason for a mobile wallet other than the phone itself?Read more...

The Jetsons-friendly cart was demoed Monday (Feb. 27) at a Microsoft event called TechForum, where various cutting-edge projects were showcased. The cart certainly has some interesting potential—and drawbacks—but one key player that is not buying into the short-term need for the cart is Whole Foods, despite the Whole Foods logo having been prominently displayed on the cart at the Microsoft demo.Read more...

That suggests the fallout from all that lost learning during Target's Amazon years goes a lot deeper than it earlier appeared. And any advantage in Target's latecomer-to-E-tail status may have been lost in the struggle just to get the site working properly.Read more...

The coincidental number that was the program's weak spot? The required information-gathering with a customer took about 10 minutes, which is also roughly the same amount of time it takes most associates to make a new sale. They receive commission for those new sales and nothing for filling out the forms. Wonder why the program didn't work well?Read more...

PA-DSS requires software providers to educate "customers, resellers and integrators on how to install and configure the payment applications in a PCI DSS-compliant manner." PA-DSS requirements also address actions resellers and integrators must take to ensure the implementation is PCI compliant. The questions, poses PCI Columnist Walter Conway, are: Who is checking? And assuming the training is sound, who is checking that the actual tech rep fixing your POS system knows what she/he is doing? Read more...

Sometimes you just have to listen to what people are really saying. Home improvement chain Lowe’s just spent more money on IT in 2011 than in any other year in its history, an aggressive investment that was spelled out in the company’s earnings call on Monday (Feb. 27). But we were still taken aback when we saw a transcript of the call from investment site SeekingAlpha.com, which quoted Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock citing network and Wi-Fi upgrades, and then saying, “And it meant rolling out offense to replace existing functionality and to enable the ability to tender a sale at any place in the store.”

Rolling out offense? Now that’s aggressive language. But a quick review of the actual earnings call recording reveals what Niblock actually said in his North Carolina accent: “And it meant rolling out iPhones to replace existing functionality.” That makes more sense. But we still like the idea of a retail CEO bragging about going on offense with IT better.…

The problem, then, for retailers attempting to enter the social networking space is whether they plan their strategy and miss new opportunities or allow that strategy to be random and chaotic and to create a host of potential legal problems from copyright infringement to defamation and potential privacy law violations, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. How so? Let's start with copyright infringement.Read more...

The same operations partners who were singing your praises for such a great move just a few short months ago, pens Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, are now calling for your head, because they are unable to operate their business the way they want to. Read more...

In our attempts to battle the never-ending assaults by Spammers, StorefrontBacktalk had to do something this week for which we need to apologize. Our direct discussion forum—Go Beyond The Story—was recently overrun by Spammers. To make the forum useful, we had to wipe out existing users. We then put in place much better security. Now, we are asking our readers who had signed up for accounts in the forum to please sign up again.

We have also cleaned up our discussion forum on LinkedIn. If you want to jump into a discussion on our LinkedIn page, you simply need to first join the StorefrontBacktalk group forum. For you Facebook fans, we have also reactivated the StorefrontBacktalk‘s Facebook page. We love when people comment on the stories, but we need to insist that only comments relating to a story be posted to that story. For comments that do not directly relate to a story or column, the Go Beyond The Story forum is home. And we want it to be a noisy home, with lots of loud arguments and shouting. That’s how retail discussions are supposed to be.…

That improves Macy’s revenue, but also sets it up to take on its most threatening rival—Amazon—where the online giant should be at its strongest.Read more...

California may have cut an Internet sales tax deal with Amazon that kicks in this year, but it’s still trying to collect last year’s taxes. On February 16, the state issued a table for taxpayers to use in estimating how much tax they owe for purchases from out-of-state E-tailers. The table, which assumes Californians spend about 1 percent of their adjusted gross income with Web merchants, is supposed to save taxpayers the trouble of adding up all their online receipts. Yeah, we’re sure that’s going to work.

Then again, maybe getting it to work isn’t the point. This may really just be an attempt to collect more ammunition for lobbying Congress or the courts. It’s a lot more convincing to argue that out-of-state E-tailers should be collecting sales taxes (or at least helping out a little) if a state can say, “We tried to get our taxpayers to pay the tax honestly—we even gave them a form and a simple table—and they still won’t pay up! But, see, we tried!”…

"This is one reason why the PCI SSC is spending a lot of time developing very detailed solution requirements for new technologies like Point-to-Point Encryption," said RSA spokesman Rob Sadowski. "It's not enough to have the best security tools if they are not implemented and deployed well."Read more...

With cookies already under tighter controls in the U.K. and the European Union, and the near-certainty of some sort of U.S. Congressional hearings, retailers should be making new customer-tracking plans—plans that don't include cookies.Read more...

And although retailers are turning up customer characteristics that customers would never volunteer, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, some mobile payment systems are digging through a phone's data to raise equally troublesome privacy issues.Read more...

Believe it or not, writes Retail Columnist Todd Michaud, that's where the money will come from. RIM had the BlackBerry on the market for years delivering E-Mail to business users around the world, but it wasn't until Apple launched the iPhone and that mobile access to E-Mail became ubiquitous.Read more...

The big problem: The most logical and secure technology fix—moving PINs to secure hardware—is something Citi seems unwilling to do.Read more...

Hewlett-Packard announced a new open-source Web browser for mobile devices on Tuesday (Feb. 14). It’s name? Isis. That’s the latest slap for ISIS, the mobile payment initiative backed by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile—apparently HP didn’t even wonder if anyone had trademarked “Isis” as the name for a mobile app (yes, ISIS has). It’s especially worrisome with ISIS now slipping into third place in the mobile payment horse race behind Google and PayPal, which are both already taking payments.

Even more confounding: Starting this month, Google now offers Google Wallet on some AT&T mobile phones and, unlike Verizon, AT&T is apparently officially allowing it. To be fair, ISIS still plans to start trials of its payments system this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin. But to be realistic, if ISIS can’t keep its founding members on board or even defend its brand name, you have to wonder whether these telcos still think they can win the mobile payment game—or if ISIS is about to change directions again.…

Whether or not its methods go too far, it's in good company in the mobile early-stage convenience versus security argument, with both PayPal—and its phone-less and card-less purchases at Home Depot—and Visa, which is pushing PIN-less EMV transactions while MasterCard is taking the more secure and less convenient pro-PIN EMV position.Read more...