Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The London-based 823-store Sainsbury's grocery chain immediately issued almost a half-million dollars' worth of £10 (roughly equivalent to $20) vouchers to some 30,000 disgruntled customers and personally--through staff volunteers and no software automation—called every one of those 30,000 to apologize and tell them about the vouchers. Read more...

A new Retail Systems Research report is challenging the way retail IT looks at application development backlogs. The report is based on a survey showing that some 79 percent of retailers have app dev backlogs of at least a year, with one-fifth of those hitting delays of more than two years.

But that’s not news to retail IT execs, who have come to see huge backlogs as a way of life. A time-revered IT tradition, if you will. The report, however, argues that the battle between system maintenance/security patches—which always get top priority—and the creation of new capabilities that the business needs should be thought of in different terms. Some are opting for outsourcing more, which would allow them to reallocate resources to accelerate new capabilities. “There’s been this shift where business has been taking more of the direction of IT investments,” said RSR’s Nikki Baird. “It should no longer be about ‘either/or.'”…

Although the question of RFID safety has been debated extensively over the years, with conflicting study results, a major new medical study released this week points to very specific electromagnetic dangers within nine inches of the transmitter.

The highly respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found 34 electromagnetic interference instances out of 123 tests, with 22 of them rated potentially hazardous. “Interference changed breathing machines’ ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop” at a distance of about nine inches, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. This may give serious pause to some retail IT operations, who can have dozens of RFID devices in loading docks and assembly lines, in addition to trucks and even on shelves. …

"Response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day. One CSC (common short code) showed a 60 percent peak-period slowdown every day, indicating a major capacity issue was present," Keynote said. "Many of the CSCs monitored showed significant reliability issues. Several (experienced) more than 10 hours of outage while one (experienced) more than 50 hours." Read more...

Since almost no one can afford to add another group of people with both auditing skills and IT skills, nor can most retailers afford to pay consulting firms to do this, I tend to recommend very specific PCI audit training courses for your internal audit staff. One way to do this is to send them to the same two day course that PCI auditors go through. Read more...

But Wal-Mart and a handful of others have been trying to do green the right way, with policies that will have a significant environmental impact and that also improve operations.Read more...

When Oracle finally introduced its Retail 13 integrated suite this week, after three years of acquisition and integration, the teams working for the world’s largest enterprise software vendor might have breathed a sigh of relief. They might have hoped that the hardest part was behind them.

But creating a vast integrated suite is not the hard part. Convincing retail IT execs, worried about politics, perception and pragmatism, to turn over their most valuable data to one license-fee-hungry vendor? That’s where the real fun starts. Read more.…

When IHL began work on the report, "I did not expect the acceleration that we're seeing in the out years," said IHL President Greg Buzek. "I did not expect how fast it's growing."

Ironically, Buzek said, the jump in later years is being partially caused by the sales slowdowns of today. As dollars are getting tighter, retailers are pushing more sales through less-labor-costly self-checkout systems and paying for the installation of more such systems. Those additional machines, over the years, will increase the number of dollars being processed by self-service. Read more...

One of the repeated arguments made in retail data security circles is that retailers tend to have much weaker security because it’s not as much of a cultural priority as, for example, banking. So it’s a little bit consoling that the latest ATM databreach is apparently not the result of a retail breach, not the result of social engineering and the trusting bank clerk, but is the first proven incident of a bank server’s breach linked to ATM fraud.

A computer intrusion into a Citibank server that processes ATM withdrawals led to two Brooklyn men making hundreds of fraudulent withdrawals from New York City cash machines in February, pocketing at least $750,000 in cash, according to a Wired story. Although Citibank told Wired that its systems had not been breached, Citibank “warned the FBI on February 1 that ‘a Citibank server that processes ATM withdrawals at 7-Eleven convenience stores had been breached,’ according to a sworn affidavit by FBI cyber-crime agent Albert Murray.”…

Are European retailers going to have any better luck than American retailers with consumer-facing biometric payments? The 750-store Albert Heijn supermarket chain, the largest such chain in the Netherlands, is about to find out.

While various European chains (such as Germany’s Wagener Department Stores) have enjoyed modest success with biometrics, the Albert Heijn chain’s June 17 statement said it would commit to the trial for six months.…

San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker gave lawyers on both sides until June 26 to address his concerns. The judge didn't specifically say that the lawyer's fees were too high, but merely that "plaintiffs' counsel has not established the basis for its fee request," leaving himself the opportunity to potentially approve the figure if he is satisfied with a justification. Read more...

A Verizon Business security report analyzed more than 500 data breach incidents over four years and found that 73 percent started from the outside and only 18 percent were inside jobs. Read more...

The hypothetical Nordstrom example shows how much less respect is paid to the online consumer than the brick-and-mortar one. Does the inherent anonymity in the Web cut both ways? Like the site visitors emboldened by their namelessness who post comments and get into flame wars that they would never have the nerve to try in person, are E-tailers treating their customers with a disrespect that they would never dare consider in a physical store? Read more...

The 74-page settlement outlined several efforts by Ameritrade, but it did not include any cash payments to the consumers who sued the company. Among the agreements were that Ameritrade will warn consumers about investment SPAM, pay for limited security testing, seed E-mail accounts seeking violators, pay $20,000 to the Honeynet Project and $35,000 to the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance as well as buy some of the impacted consumers a one-year license for an Ameritrade-selected anti-SPAM software package. Read more...

"Whether we're talking about logs generated by network or application firewalls, intrusion detection systems, file integrity monitor tools or the operating systems themselves, I've come to the conclusion that the only people who don't hate them are the vendors who sell them. But, whether we hate them, disrespect them or merely ignore them, we need to learn to live with them." Read more...

Just in time for Friday the 13th, Oracle is finally ready to unveil Oracle Retail V 13, with a formal rollout slated for Tuesday (June 17).

Oracle’s main retail suite is not expected to undergo any radical changes (even the name change is expected to be slight); it’s mostly claims of better integration and interoperability.…

"One thing that is true about Amazon's site is that it is very complex, utilizing numerous backend database, proxy servers, distributed application and Web servers, lots of dynamic images, etc.," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Web site performance tracking firm Keynote. "Even accessing the homepage involves complex multi-step interactions between the Web browser and a number of backend systems within Amazon." Read more...

Note to retailers looking to offer free Wi-Fi: It’s a good idea to first make sure you can make the offer. Starbucks discovered that an offer of two hours of free Wi-Fi a day simply wasn’t working.

“Due to overwhelming interest in Card Rewards we are currently experiencing difficulty accessing Starbucks Card accounts. We are working to fix the problem and ask that you please try again later,” said a page shown to site visitors, according to this IDG News Service story. A Starbucks spokesman said that the problems were on Starbucks’ end, not AT&T’s. “Customers overwhelmed the site when joining Starbucks Card Rewards,” said Doug Cavarocchi, a Starbucks spokesman, in an e-mail. …

Most U.S. Web sites fail the most basic of site performance tests, according to new stats issued by Pingdom. “The worst performance grades were given to Foxnews.com, IGN.com, Gamespot.com, CNN.com, Break.com and ESPN.go.com. The best performance grades were given to Google.com, Live.com, Orkut.com and Craigslist.org. This is not entirely surprising considering their minimalistic style.”

But the more interesting part of the Pingdom stats is the analysis that looks at the sites’ size, HTTP requests and caching. It’s worth a read.…

Computerworld columnist Frank Hayes–a former colleague of mine from CMP and an awesome folk singer as well–has a wonderful column out about why the Wal-Mart RFID effort is still having problems.

Although some of the proprietary arguments are slightly overstated, Hayes makes a great point about how Wal-Mart’s $2 per pallet non-RFID penalty reflects a lack of understanding of why suppliers have resisted RFID tagging. It’s the software implementation costs and the fact that different retailers demand different versions. Hayes’ column is worth reading. (But not everyone seems to agree. The RFID Journal took exception to the piece, on several levels. And then some RFID Journal readers took exception to that disagreement.)…

The new proposed law—which passed both the House and Senate this week and is awaiting President Bush's signature—essentially removes the expiration date requirement of the law. So assuming the president signs it into law, the bill just got a lot easier to navigate. Read more...

Germany’s METRO Group is experimenting with RFID inserts to track meat and to immediately locate any product that is about to expire or that has expired.

METRO is placing the inlays into the foam meat packing trays used in their Future Store. “RFID has a key role to play in quality management for fresh food,” said Gerd Wolfram, managing director of MGI METRO Group Information Technology in a statement. “This automatic product identification technology will contribute to product quality and efficiency in our stores.”…