With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily. But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow? Read more...
A major regional fast-food chain—with 433 restaurants in the Southeastern United States—is going to offer free wireless connections to anyone who wants to surf while sitting in a burger joint.
The Krystal Co. (the nation's second-oldest fast-food restaurant chain, founded in 1932) is clearly hoping that a lot of customers will be intrigued and will munch on a burger and fries while gulping from its unlimited refill 802.11 fountain. Read more...
Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn't the experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek. Read more...
As the CIO for a $4.1 billion health care products distribution company, Jim Harding knows only too well the changing face of medical technology today.
He sees senior physicians hand-writing prescriptions, penciling notes in patient folders and resisting electronics while the younger physicians embrace PDAs and digital transcription units.Read more...
A Pennsylvania payment vendor is preparing conversion equipment to create contactless vending machines, aimed as much at addressing the finite supply of coins and facilitating price increases as shortening lines.
The vendor, USA Technologies, said it has had contactless vending machine technology ready for some time, but waited to introduce it until the market seemed ready for widespread contactless deployment. Read more...
Corporate Web sites are becoming bloated bandwidth hogs, which should surprise absolutely no one in high tech. But a survey is proving that the reckless use of multimedia, animation, JavaScript and other impressive but non-informational offerings is starting to have a negative impact on site traffic. The site visitor's pain from overdesigned or overprogrammed sites—those being two different but equally sinful efforts—is more than mere time-wasting.Read more...
When Cingular announced it was buying AT&T Wireless, top executives promised a seamless integration for users. Easy for them to say. The top execs of the $32 billion combined wireless phone company who were making those announcements didn't have to wrestle with 2.5 petabytes of data, more than 600 overlapping applications, and tons of redundant and incompatible systems. That task fell to CIO Thaddeus Arroyo and his team of more than 6,000 IT professionals. Read more...
As the retail industry starts to embrace contactless payment in a big way—led by $41 billion retailer 7-Eleven and Chase, the nation's largest issuer of credit cards—arguments are renewing about just how safe and fraud-proof these cards will be. Read more...
Contactless payments—whether they're made using a fob dangling from a keychain at a gas station, an RFID chip embedded in a cell phone or a new contactless credit/debit card—have now moved from the experimental to the real-world stage. Read more...
With American retailers preparing to replace their aging point-of-sale units at record rates, a retail POS vendor called VeriFone wants to flood checkout lanes with Linux-based full-motion video, 65,356-color displays and digital stereo sound. The new unit—dubbed the MX870—is designed to deliver animated ads and demos in a loud, attention-demanding manner, which is not hard when customers have no choice but to stand in line.Read more...
When JP Morgan Chase—the nation's largest issuer of credit cards—announced it was incorporating contactless payment capabilities in all upcoming credit cards, it was a huge legitimizing moment for contactless.
It generated lots of consumer buzz for the feature that Chase calls "Blink" and it is most likely the first RFID-enabled payment device that became a punchline on Saturday Night Live. (The JP Morgan folk loved that.)Read more...
Barb Seitz's craft business is doing well, but the owner of Barb's Custom Sewing needs to sells many of her products on the road, often at trade shows.
Today's wireless POS (point-of-sale) technology allows her to process orders in the field, but she has received an unexpected bonus: lower transaction fees because she rarely if ever needs to pay a "card not present" charge. Read more...
When customers step into a cab from the Hello Taxi company in Brookline, Mass., they don't have to worry about fumbling in their pockets for cash, or about swiping their credit card in a moving vehicle, or even about finding their wireless fob to wave in front of a reader. To pay and tip the driver, passengers just say the last four digits of their cell phones, and then they can run. Read more...
Large retail chains have always had a healthy dose of a shell game in their heritage, exemplified by the highly marketed new larger bottle of shampoo and the much higher, entirely unmarketed price tag that goes with it. A price increase by any other name still delivers fewer hair washes per dollar. When it comes to retail technology, it seems those habits are hard to break. Read more...
The 1,200-store Ritz Camera chain wants to let customers drop off film without having to slow down and thinks RFID-enabled contactless payments are picture perfect. With competitors including Wal-Mart moving in, this specialty retailer is stressing expertise and getting people in and out quickly.
Vice President of Information Systems Bob O'Hern (Ritz doesn't have a CIO, but he acts in that capacity) said he likes the RFID capabilities within a contactless payment system, but doesn't yet see its value in his supply chain. Read more...
One of the most frustrating parts of clothes shopping is that manufacturer size numbers are inconsistent, making the purchase of an outfit that fits a gamble, at best. A Philadelphia startup is trying to use technology to both get a more precise measure of consumers and to match it against a detailed database on what various apparel companies truly mean with their sizes. Read more...
When I reported some of the problems that Cingular was having selling and supporting data after its merger with AT&T Wireless, some Cingular officials said it was not the typical experience of its data-buying customers. Read more...
On paper, it certainly must have looked like a "can't lose" situation. Two major industry events happened and they both pointed to an obvious move: Cingular should be aggressively pushing data.
Just about one year ago, Cingular announced that it would be buying AT&T Wireless for $41 billion, creating the nation's largest cell phone operation. Last year also saw PalmOne faring well with its Treo line of cell phone/PDA hybrids. Read more...
In the middle of Albuquerque, N.M., sits a 170,000-square-foot chunk of land that is slated to be the site for a new kind of retail store: one where customers can buy a week's worth of groceries without ever having to set foot outside their car.
On paper—and, thus far, that's the only place this grocery store exists—this proposal seems to have plenty to offer both retailers and customers. Read more...
Are "smart-carts" state-of-the-art and cutting edge for retail technology? It's a matter of perspective. Compared with the best European and Asian retail chains, American retailers are electronic laggards, especially in the grocery segment.
Even compared with U.S. retail technology discussions, these carts are merely deploying and productizing capabilities that have been publicly discussed for more than a year. But compared with what is actually being used—and even offered—with today's American grocery retailers, these Fujitsu carts are positively Jetsons. Read more...
Credit card companies, through consumer promotions and lower fees for retailers, have been whittling away at the last few cash-friendly refuges.
And as though George Washington needed even more disrespect to be heaped upon his picture on the one-dollar-bill, contactless payment systems are now helping to take the green out of greenbacks. Read more...
One of the most disheartening things for a technology journalist to learn is that a lot of readers look at magazines to see the ads. Well, maybe not solely to look at the ads, but the fact that readers even glance at those dastardly marketing con jobs is enough to make us weep in our espressos. Read more...
A hungry consumer pulls up to the drive-through window in a California McDonald's restaurant and places a dinner order. The person taking the order points out that the caller placed only three drink orders for four dinners and reminds the diner of a special that day on apple pie.
This might be a fairly typical fast-food—or, in industry parlance, QSR for quick-service restaurant—exchange were it not for the fact that the customer and the order-taker are dozens of miles apart, connected through a VPN-secured voice-over-IP hookup. Read more...
Speaking to an overflow crowd at the National Retail Federation's Redefining Retail show, Metro Group CIO Zygmunt Mierdorf beamed in live footage of the company's prototype RFID-enabled stores from Germany, showing interactive changing rooms that make clothing recommendations and have clerks bring additional pieces, a cashier shelf that instantly scans items (so the cashier doesn't have to) and a privacy system that literally leaves the chip in the store. Read more...
When major customers walk into a Circuit City location, CIO Mike Jones wants to whisper customized sales pitches into their ears—literally. Jones's scenario is simple: As customers walk into the store, they receive a very light wireless headset. Read more...
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
