Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The majority—if not the vast majority— of recent StorefrontBacktalk stories will still be available to read for free. So will our highly moderated discussion forums, which won't waste your time with spam and vendor pitches. But readers who aren't Premium subscribers will only be able to see the very beginning of Premium stories and columns—and they won't have any access at all to the Premium forums, private discussion groups, monthly reports or the archives of StorefrontBacktalk stories that are more than 30 days old.Read more...

It's called Beyond The Story because our discussion forums thus far have been limited to comments on individual stories. And we policed those comments strictly, making sure that they were indeed about the story they were attached to and that they were non-promotional, non-offensive and respectful. (Well, as respectful as IT professionals debating RFID, PCI, CRM and Mobile are likely to get. We don't seek miracles here.)Read more...

When RadioShack announced Monday (Jan. 24) that its board had chosen CFO Jim Gooch as its new CEO, it went out of its way to mention Gooch’s background in supply chain management and IT. This is just the latest example of retail boards showing new found respect for IT experience when sizing up folk for the big CEO corner office, including Home Depot, which is watching its own CFO’s IT chops when evaluating her for the CEO gig plus related IT respect demonstrations from Sears, Macy’s and Borders.

This IT love-fest is consistent with a move—started about 5 to 10 years ago—of assigning the CFO to oversee IT. Before that, it was more common for CIOs to report into COOs or often CEOs. The shift to having CIOs report into the financial group is an acknowledgement that IT is becoming more strategic and that it’s an area that CFOs must master if they want to run the whole ship.…

Citigroup has long been considered the most influential technology tracker on Wall Street, so these annual lists are not to be dismissed. IT used to be a backstage corporate function in Wall Street's eyes, but there are more indicators lately that the money folk are carefully watching the tech folk.Read more...

Timothy Kasbe, a celebrated IT exec who arrived at the chain in February 2009 after having served as the CIO of India's largest retail chain, quietly left the company early last month. Very quietly.Read more...

However, by fueling the fears of every anti-RFID privacy advocate, these faux buttons may do far more harm than good. To be fair, these may not be faux buttons, in that they may actually function as buttons. In which case, they're not faux: They're Trojan horses. But in this version of the classic Trojan War tale, the soldiers inside the horse might turn around and attack their retail Greek creators.Read more...

Background in "store systems would also be interesting" for this position, said DSW CIO Carlos Cherubin. "This is a new position, born of the fact that our organization is growing," he said, referring to its current 210-person IT operation (internal IT staff of 170 plus about 40 IT contractors). "We're a 200-person shop day-to-day," Cherubin said.Read more...

Like most media outlets these days, we here at StorefrontBacktalk get deluged with PR people pitching stories about their clients. But also like most media outlets, very few of those pitches are appropriate for us.

To help, we have crafted a page with our best-kept secrets about how to successfully pitch a story to us. It starts with understanding our audience and how we try and differentiate our stories. (Note: This particular blurb is a horrible example of what our typical stories are like, but it’s a pretty good example of an irony, so at least we have that.) So for PR professionals only: Please check out our PR tip cheat sheet, and your chances of getting a story placed will soar.…

The problem for alternative payments isn't just doing the things that conventional payment cards do at lower cost. It's also breaking through the lack of familiarity that customers, banks and even retailers have with new payment approaches. Visa and MasterCard remain in the POS driver’s seat because of their network, but also because they're a known quantity. And as much as retailers want cheaper alternatives, the Bling Nation/Fifth Third deal illustrates how much of a challenge it is to buck the current infrastructure.Read more...

It’s hard enough to track inventory using RFID tags; read rates are low enough that tags are often misread the first time. It’s even worse in a warehouse, where multiple RFID readers can interfere with each other. The Patent Office is offering one of those good news/bad news scenarios. Good News: A university patent claims to dramatically improve RFID read rates, which sounds like a huge advantage for retailers trying to manage inventory. Bad News: The patented technique cuts interference by automatically shutting down all RFID readers in the area except one.

That makes this approach useless if inventory employees are using handheld scanners. On the other hand, it could still work for warehouse areas with fixed RFID scanners that automatically check inventory. Rapidly turning all those scanners on and off could especially help with frozen or liquid items, where signals are particularly hard to detect, according to inventor Jagannathan Sarangapani of the Missouri University of Science and Technology. But how well the technique actually works in the real world is unknown; no RFID vendor has yet licensed the patent.…

The only price in this Faustian deal: You need to let your customers take the signs home with them, after they've paid you $40 or more for the privilege.Read more...

The real danger here, he writes, is that the larger NFC value proposition might be poisoned if NFC is pigeonholed as just another card replacement. If that happens, it would effectively kill retailer and consumer adoption.Read more...

The next time you’re stuck on an airplane with just your Kindle and you want to know what other retailers are working on to make your life miserable when you land, fear not. StorefrontBacktalk is now available as native content on Kindle.

It goes beyond the headlines, and the Kindle supposedly updates this content when you’re near a connection so you can read it when you’re not. (I have to trust my Kindle-carrying colleagues to tell me how our content looks. Personally, if something can’t give me a paper cut while reading it, why bother?)…

If retailers could do anything, what would be the top five things they’d change about PCI? What about mobile? Which mobile interactions will be deployed first and which will backburnered? And how far are merged channel (the last element of the multi-channel to cross-channel to merged-channel triumvirate) efforts going to be adopted by June of next year?

To try and get answers, StorefrontBacktalk and Forrester Research on Wednesday (Sept. 22) launched a research project on these issues and we’d love to have you share your views with us. Responses will be published anonymously, in aggregate only. Other topics in the survey include customer service techniques, global distribution, E-Commerce and store investment priorities, and CRM strategies. If you’d like to be included in this study, the survey is the best place to start. We’ll be publishing the results shortly before the holiday insanity begins. …

Everywhere else in the world, the cliché is “When it rains, it pours.” But for retailers now focusing on RFID projects, a more apt phrase would be “When it rains, it’s a drought.” That’s because a major financial investment firm is reporting a sharp mobile RFID reader shortage. The cause: lots of RFID projects, with Wal-Mart’s 20,000-unit-order leading the way.

The report comes from investment firm Robert W. Baird & Co., according to SupplyChainDigest. Beyond Wal-Mart, the reasons cited were “supply constraints that have lasted for months in basic electrical components that have caused delivery problems in a wide number of high tech gear, including mobile devices”; a 23,000-customer order from a European logistics company; and the recent leap in popularity of mobile–versus fixed–RFID readers. “A quick check at ScanSource, a distributor that sells exclusively to other resellers and VARs, showed about half of the models of Motorola 9090-G mobile RFID terminals were in-stock, and the other half showing as ‘call for availability,'” the story said. RFID: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.…

But, argues Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud, this situation gets even more challenging because the person who had the implementation role before you could have stacked the deck against you. It is much easier to say "yes" to a request for something different than it is to say "no." In most cases, these requests will genuinely move the business in the right direction. But that's a double whammy: It means your predecessor may have created a field of variance landmines that you must painfully discover on your own.Read more...

Among the more fascinating tidbits to come out of the Black Hat/Defcon show in Las Vegas last week was a demonstration that an RFID tag could be read from 217 feet away. The tester used two large antennas and ham radio equipment, reported Dark Reading

But retailers have been discovering the ability to monitor RFID at very long distances for years. That’s the irony of RFID. How can something with such low read-rates at a distance of two inches—when you absolutely need it to be read—also be readable by a corporate spy across the parking lot? Admit it: Technology (and cats, by the way) not so secretly wants us all to fail.…

The reality is that Wal-Mart's gradual deployment makes a lot of sense. The media-repeated cries of privacy invasion are simply silly, based on ludicrously unrealistic assumptions of how easy this data would be to access, assuming anyone had any reason to even try. The most interesting part of the rollout, though, is the tag disposal question.Read more...

Franz Dill spent 30 years in various technology management roles at Procter & Gamble, the world's largest consumer goods manufacturer, much of it dealing with retail technology concerns. Now two years off of the P&G payroll, he tries to put the new Wal-Mart item-level RFID move into context in this GuestView column. Read more...

Todd Ablowitz, president of the Double Diamond Group and one of the more interesting payment experts in the U.S. (for us, "interesting" is someone who thinks a well-balanced presentation is where all audience members are pissed-off equally), has been sitting with lobbyists and studying the Durbin bill, currently scheduled to go before a House-Senate conference committee on Thursday (June 24). His conclusion, with a little bit of mildly tortured logic: The bill will strongly incentivize banks to accelerate their acceptance of Chip-and-PIN in the U.S.Read more...

But therein lies a delicious Catch-22: Once consumers use a technology four or five times, they typically master it and can then proceed effortlessly. The first one or two times, of course, will likely be rough.Read more...

Starting this week, each StorefrontBacktalk article has two new features. First, in response to many reader requests, we have now added a print function for each article. Just click on the Print icon (right across from the article’s date) to generate a web page formatted for printing, without page breaks, sidebars or reader comments.

Second, we now automatically add a URL to any content that you copy and paste from an article. Yes, it’s a feature: Instead of copying an entire article to send to someone, now you can copy just the most relevant part and paste it into a message; the URL for the full article is included at no extra charge. Tipping, of course, is always encouraged.…

"I wonder when people will realize that mobile devices communicate via, ummm, radio?" asked the IT exec. "And that microwave radio signals (which GPS, mobile phones and microwave ovens all use) don‘t transit solid surfaces, especially conductive ones like metal mall roofs, all that well? And that carriers make no promises relative to in-building coverage (and virtually no promises relative to out-of-building coverage)? And the U.S. government makes no promises at all relative to GPS signal penetration or even availability?"Read more...

But what Sam's Club discovered is that it quickly became its own direct revenue stream.Read more...

But the next day (June 2), a self-proclaimed hacker was on Canadian television demonstrating once again that both MasterCard and Visa contactless cards can be read with a $10 commercial RFID reader available on eBay.Read more...