Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

During the breach, "no personal information, such as names or addressed, was accessed or obtained" but the breach did expose customer credit and debit card numbers along with their expiration dates, said Hannaford CEO Ronald Hodge.Read more...

You don't address security concerns by pretending they don't exist. You acknowledge that everything is relative and that weaknesses are there but there are advantages, too. Read more...

This is one of these “everyone already pretty much knew this but it’s nice someone took the time to prove it” studies. The University of Arkansas was paid by Wal–Mart to find out whether RFID actually improves inventory accuracy. It found that, yes, it does, to the tune of some 13 percent.

But the methodology is a lot more interesting than the as-expected result. The team followed air fresheners at 16 Wal-Marts for 23 weeks where “a national inventory-auditing group determined each day’s on-hand air-freshener inventory by manually counting every item in all 16 stores.” Read this RFID Journal piece for a look into how to prove inventory accuracy and why a retailer can never afford to duplicate this study.…

A grocer offering milk cartons that glow when their milk turns sour and a programmable soft drink that will change its flavor to a consumer’s whim. These are two of the more unusual ways nanotechnology may impact retailers in the next few years, according to this fascinating story in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.

While the product capabilities can be exciting, the potential health hazards are better described as terrifying. If groceries of any kind are among your SKUs, you should check this piece out. …

"Since Bernie ordered me to accompany him on this stupid trip to Philadelphia and we sit here in a five-hour connecting flight delay in Chicago, it's the least I can do to thank him by giving his luggage a much-deserved holiday in Hong Kong," deviously thinks Brad, the junior LAN administrator with far too much time on his hands. Read more...

As of January, at least 60 percent of retailers have POS systems that are older than 5 years and a healthy chunk of those are more than 10 years old, according to an Aberdeen survey of 175 merchants.

The report tied those aging POS units with customer service problems “as order management, loyalty programs, and payment acceptance processes are fraught with delays,” according to this RetailWire column about the Aberdeen study…

Some retailers cite the relationship between Enron and Accenture as an example of why they do not use their PCI assessor for remediation services, or purchase security products from their assessor. Read more...

"We need to do a little more training," said Michael Verdesca, the chain's VP for systems development. Read more...

As Wal-Mart toys with various approaches to grow and continue to dominate retail, a Wal-Mart experiment in Michigan is fascinating in its difference. It has crafted a store focused on the local Middle Eastern community, complete with Muslim greeting cards, Lebanese pop CDs and kusa and batenjan among the produce offerings.

Technology is not a key factor in this store’s approach, according to this detailed Newsweek story, but the store truly catering to the local residents is impressive nonetheless. How’s this for not acting like Wal-Mart? “The insular company even agreed to be scrutinized by a community advisory board made up of local Arab-American leaders to ensure it isn’t harming the mom-and-pop shops. One example: Wal-Mart agreed to charge one dime more than local grocers for a six-pack of pita bread.”…

JCPenney and Krogers are the latest U.S. members of the National Retail Federation’s Association for Retail Technology Standards, joining the newest global members of Tesco, Carrefour and IKEA.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards is an international membership organization that, since 1993, has said that it was dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards.…

Hello, blog readers! We’ve been approached by a company that wants to create a 3-D environment for StorefrontBacktalk, complete with avatars for all readers. Before we explored this more seriously, we wanted to ask our readers whether we should proceed. Therefore…

…

The Metro Group’s RFID trial efforts have been well-known, but this is an interesting International Herald-Tribune story discussing some of the privacy debates within Europe on their efforts.

The piece quotes a Metro person as saying that a recent European Union effort to force the tags to be deactivated at POS as the kiss of death for consumer-facing RFID. “If we have to deactivate at the check-out, then the technology is going to stay within the logistics process – to say where is a box or where is the pallet in the distribution center. It won’t come on consumer items. They’re going to kill the technology with that.”…

The potential is absolutely there, with retailers collecting molecular mountains of shopping history—sometimes more than a decade's worth—and law enforcement seeking creative ways to find criminals (or people they think are criminals) who are quite determined about not being found. Read more...

Global RFID revenue is expected to hit $1.2 billion this year and $3.5 billion in the next four years, according to new Gartner projections. This year’s figures represents an almost 31 percent increase from last year.

Gartner reported that the leading segments were discrete manufacturing (21 percent), national and international government (20 percent), transportation (20 percent) and then retail (14 percent).…

Last week, StorefrontBacktalk ran a story chastising a security vendor, Shift4, for having issued a news release that said retailers using its products wouldn't have to worry about PCI requirements because they would be excluded. The vendor on Monday issued a news release, apologizing for the earlier one and corrected the record. But the core question--about it's encryption approach--still stands. Read more...

This move comes on top of an incident earlier this month when an undersea cable was cut near Dubai, also wreaking havoc with global Internet traffic. Are more robust safeguards needed? Is these kinds of disruptions can be happen so easily by accidents, how vulnerable would they be to deliberate terrorist efforts? Read more...

There are several reasons for the unexpected spike, chief among them PCI demands hitting smaller retailers and new profit-enhancing techniques that require current POS equipment, said IHL President Greg Buzek. Read more...

One person working on the trial—sworn to secrecy by Wal-Mart—said the group initially tried cramming in a lot of sales info into each text message. This was done on the theory that it would increase the probability of hitting on an item that particular consumer would want. "We were sending 10-15 in about three or four text messages," the manager said. "We learned that three messages is where the consumer says, 'I've heard enough from you, Mr. Retailer,'." Read more...

For example, one of the digital services for their in-store kiosk was from an E-Commerce site called Shutterfly.com. That decision went beyond the attraction of digital photos, said Kevin Ertell, Borders' E-commerce chief. Read more...

But it's been difficult to quantify the ROI of such chat functions, mostly because it's impossible to know reliably what the customer would have likely done had a chat session not happened. Forrester Research this week this to quantify the slippery ROI arguments for interactive chat and made an eloquent case for chat investment. Read more...

Retailers and telcos and others are watching test markets such as New York City and seeing how many consumers are using contactless payment. Their assumptions are based on the number of contactless cards in the population. But if that population doesn't realize that they have a contactless card, there's nothing valid that can be concluded when those people do not use them. Read more...

With CRM systems trying to interact with Web analytics, mobile databases, purchase and returns histories and tons of other non-payment databases, the amount of non-credit-card data that is at risk easily dwarfs Visa transactions. Read more...

Although that amount might seem trivial, the librarian initially argued that it was likely more than most consumers who filed class-action lawsuits ever received (after attorney fees are paid) and it would be received much more quickly.Read more...