Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When I thought about retail IT operations in 2005, I envisioned an eccentric, wealthy hermit who lives in a comfortable mansion in the middle of the woods.

The hermit certainly knows about the big city and all of the glorious things he could buy there, but he is content. He has what he needs and a sufficient number of things that he wants. His home is sound and he doesn't have a heck of a lot of motivation to go out and make it fancy and state-of-the-art. Maybe someday, he thinks. Read more...

The traditionally long lines in post offices during the holiday season are noticeably shorter this year, and figures show why.

About 1.1 billion fewer pieces of snail mail were sent in 2004, and that's on top of an almost 3.5 billion drop from 2003 and a 1.3 billion drop from 2002. All told, the government's figures show that Americans sent 103.7 billion pieces of first-class mail in 2001 and only 97.9 billion pieces in 2004, a loss of some 5.8 billion pieces of mail or about a 6 percent drop. Read more...

Running the technology operations for a billion-dollar retail clothing chain is difficult enough during the holidays, let alone if most of your customers are too young to get their own credit cards, or even drive. Just ask Ron Ehlers, vice president for Information Systems at Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., which runs 743 PacSun stores in 50 states and Puerto Rico. Read more...

In many ways, 2004 will be seen as a technological turning point for retail: the year that many technologies that have been hyped for years started to become real. Traditionally, retail has always been a mixed barcode for being technologically advanced. Read more...

One of the most logistically challenging situations for any large retailer is the return. Newgistics Inc., a Texas retail service firm, launched a tracking service intended to alleviate some of the uncertainty involved in the process. Read more...

There's no shortage of legitimate reasons why the Sears-Kmart merger will not cause anyone in Bentonville, Ark., to lose much sleep. But most of the arguments boil down to two points. One: Historically, big mergers rarely succeed. Two: Adding weak plus weak doesn't equal strong. Read more...

Wawa CIO Neil McCarthy's voice reveals his anger as he recounts a recent meeting he had with bank executives to complain about high credit card fees that are out of proportion with services. Wawa's 550 stores sell a huge amount of gasoline: about 110,000 gallons per week per store, which places it among the highest volume in the country. Typical volume for U.S. gas stations is about 40,000 gallons, McCarthy said. Read more...

When Kmart and Sears announced their plans to merge and create the nation's third-largest retailer, it shook the retail technology world.

Although it will take months for the two retail leaders to merge their almost 3,500 stores with a projected $55 billion in annual revenue, the combined operation will have the ability to significantly influence retail technology trends. Read more...

An age-old CRM criticism is that it's an expensive package that often delivers the information too late (long after the customer has left) and to the wrong people (back-office managers instead of salespeople on the floor). One CRM firm introduced two packages that it claimed avoids those problems. Read more...

Reigning over 175 home entertainment stores in 21 states, Tweeter CIO Bill Morrison looks cautiously at the calendar as the year-end holidays approach. While many of his counterparts are trying to train oceans of seasonal employees and hoping that errors don't obliterate consumers service, goodwill and inventory accuracy, Morrison sits back, confident in the chain's decision to forgo any customer-facing seasonal help. Read more...

In the first year or two of e-commerce, one sign of sure trouble was seeing a high number of abandoned shopping carts.

I've always loved the term "abandoned shopping carts" because it's one of the rare examples in technology where the term quite accurately—and explicitly—describes what it means to describe. It refers to a customer who starts to shop, puts some items into a virtual shopping cart and then simply goes away before buying anything. Read more...

The time-honored tradition of retail rebates assumes that many customers won't bother. Staples Inc. hallenges that approach with an online campaign aimed at making rebates point-and-click easy. Read more...

In one corner of Microsoft Corp., the smaller the better is the order of the day for new customers. Microsoft's latest retail push is focusing on the smallest of retailers, those with perhaps a single checkout lane and no more than nine stores. Read more...

Best Buy is a great example of a company that brilliantly deploys technology—but then drops the ball in communicating.

As the holiday season approached, we had good news and bad news on the major retail multichannel front. The good news was that some retailers were getting a lot better at handling the technology. The bad news was that their employees often didn't know about it, making the advantages moot. Read more...

With wireless uncertainty as its staunch ally, Vivotech will introduce a system to help retailers quickly convert existing POS units to accept wireless entries. Read more...

In the clothing business, selling a suit that doesn't fit a customer makes little sense, even if it's highly profitable. The same can be said for retail e-commerce strategies: There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all Web site. Casual Male, with more than 533 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, dominates the "big and tall men" apparel niche, which it identifies as a $6 billion market. Read more...

When Microsoft Corp. unveiled its embedded operating system for retailers, it stressed the mini-OS' plug-and-play capability. But one key motivation for the company might have been the fear that retailers were considering upgrading without Microsoft. Late 2004 had retailers at a key IT management point, with aging POS (point of sale) systems pressuring them to upgrade, but many standard upgrade paths unappealing. This drove some retailers to consider Linux. Read more...

Store managers are starting to complain that their data-collection efforts are baring fruit, says Evan Schuman, but they're not being allowed to eat any of it. It's a common complaint within retail circles. Read more...

In an attempt to fend off retail moves from SAP AG, PeopleSoft Inc. and JDA Software Group Inc. announced an alliance that they said better serves retailers. Under the deal, the companies will integrate PeopleSoft's Enterprise Financial Management with JDA's Portfolio Merchandise Management. The move followed PeopleSoft's alliance with IBM. Read more...

A dairy truck driver pulls up to a 7-Eleven convenience store and is preparing to deliver crates of milk when the store manager greets him.

"Hold on a moment," the manager says, as he looks at an RFID readout on his PDA. "These crates over here are bad." Read more...

Historically, the two most difficult technology decisions involve migration. Put simply: when to get into a technology/platform and when to get out. A senior Best Buy executive gave a much needed reminder that while exit/entrance issues get all the headlines, it's the detail-ridden implementation/execution issues that usually decide success or failure. Read more...

Linux penetration into retail isn't nearly as significant as commonly believed, according to a study from industry analyst firm Venture Development Corp. (VDC). "There's a lot of talk, a lot of news around Linux and a lot of hype," said Mike Liard, senior analyst at VDC and a co-author of the report. Read more...

Today's retail payment space is ripe for radical change, says the CIO for Morgan Stanley's Discover Financial Services Inc. unit. And when radical change happens, it can shake up an industry, and market leaders can find themselves in a market that is much less friendly than before. "I've never seen so much change in a particular space at any one point in time. In Europe, there is a movement mandating the use of chip cards and PINs," said Diane Offereins, Discover's CIO and executive vice president. Read more...

Are retail IT execs too comfortable and timid to be effective? Are legacy systems so extensive, the fundamental infrastructure so adequate and the margins so tight that modernization is too much work and too risky? Those decidedly uncomfortable questions were raised by the CIO of Discover Financial in an interview. Read more...

What do you do if you're a struggling second-tier credit card company and your main advantage is offering lower prices to retailers? One approach is to position yourself as more convenient and more modern than your competitors and to focus on places that your rivals don't dominate. That's a big part of the strategy behind Discover Financial Services Inc.'s sudden embrace of biometric technology, according to CIO Diane Offereins. Read more...