Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The biggest current concern—which is also likely to be the most short-lived—is that the service is available on a relatively few number of phones in the U.S.. That concern—a shortage of supported phones—was mentioned by a Sears manager involved in the trial. Read more...

But as I was looking at two unrelated privacy legal filings on Friday, was struck by the different legal tactics and the very different probability of success. This all stems from two unrelated privacy breaches from three deep-pocketed companies: $52 billion Sears, $41 billion Sprint and $36 billion Wells Fargo. Read more...

IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS COUNTY DEPARTMENT, CHANCERY DIVISION
CHRISTINE DESANTIS, individually and ) on behalf of a class of similarly situated individuals, ) )
Plaintiff ) No.
) JURY TRIAL DEMANDED
v. )
) SEARS, ROEBUCK AND CO., ) a New York Corporation )
) Defendant )

CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT
Plaintiff Christine Desantis, on behalf of herself and a class of similarly situated
individuals, brings this action against defendant Sears, Roebuck and Co. ("Sears"). Upon
personal knowledge as to herself and her own acts and upon information and belief as to all other
matters, Desantis complains as follows:
VENUE
1. Venue is proper in Cook County because Sears resides in Cook County and
because the wrongful acts arose here.

PARTIES

2. Desantis is a resident of New Jersey.

3. Sears is an Illinois corporation with its principle place of business in Hoffman

Estates, Illinois, located in Cook County.

SEARS’S UNSECURED "MANAGEMYHOME" WEBPAGE

4. In an effort to promote its website and increase sales, Sears has established a web-based system to allow customers to view their purchase history on-line at www.managemyhome.com ("Managemyhome website").

5. Sears’s system, however, is fatally flawed and was designed in such a way as to significantly compromise the private information of its customers.

6. Sears’s system works as follows: A user goes to Managemyhome website, creates an account and logs-in. The user then need only enter in publicly-available information (such as the name, phone number and street address) of a Sears customer in order to view the customer’s history of on-line and even in-store purchases. The Managemyhome website provides detailed histories of past purchases, including model numbers, purchase dates, warranty information, and protection plans.

7. Moreover, the Managemyhome website will provide purchase history of all residents …

The Sears move came hours after Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Benjamin Edelman published details on how consumers using Sears' ManageMyHome site could find detailed purchase histories about other Sears shoppers merely by typing in their name, phone number and street address into the site. Read more...

But the chain is also learning that the online world—with its thousands of bloggers armed with screen captures—is fairly unforgiving when it comes to marketing excesses. Read more...

"Sears and CSC have amicably settled their differences on mutually satisfactory terms, with Sears paying an undisclosed amount to CSC," said the brief statement, issued just before 10 PM (EST). Read more...

A USA Today technology columnist learned the hard way that online-offline integration isn’t what it’s supposed to be. And it was Sears that taught him that lesson.

In the USA Today column, the writer describes having bought a microwave oven from Sears, which was supposed to be delivered and installed through the local Sears store. “Sears.com and Sears at the mall, however, don’t share a common database. My order, I learned later, had to be manually sent from Sears.com to the local store. Unfortunately, that process did not allow the dot-com folks to pass along the fact that we had paid for installation.”

After 14 phonecalls, the columnist surrendered best practises and did his own multi-channel communication: “We eventually gave someone at the retail store our Sears.com login information and walked him through our account online so he could see the original order and that we had paid for installation. We got our money back.” It’s really something IT folk need to read.…

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...

Most of the retailers did OK, including Walmart, CVS, Costco, Home Depot, Target, Walgreen, Lowe's, Best Buy and Sears. The grocery chains (Kroger, Safeway and Supervalu) did poorly, but mobile commerce is generally a low grocery priority. Then we get back to Amazon, the retailer—let alone e-tailer—that has generally made all matters tech a huge priority. Amazon got beaten up on the ratings partially because the spreadsheet said it didn't have a true mobile site. But it seems to have a true mobile site—a very nice-looking one, too. They do, but it's apparently not done in the way that Google has in mind.Read more...

That goes far beyond the original lawsuit, which only covered default interchange rules, honor-all-cards rules and anti-steering rules. If the case went to trial and lost every claim, that would still just lock in the card brands' control of interchange and card-acceptance rules. But the proposed settlement would go far beyond that—extending to block any challenge to PCI and breach penalties.Read more...

But a recent case with Neiman Marcus takes these retail defenses to the next level. When Neiman Marcus received its letter, the retailer didn't respond. It sued immediately, even before knowing the name of whom it was suing. And as if to underscore how big a mess this all is, the day Neiman Marcus sued that patent troll, an unrelated patent troll sued Neiman Marcus.Read more...

The Little Rock, Arkansas, police investigating the armed robbery—where the gunman slashed the assistant manager's tires to distract him before ordering him at gunpoint to open the safe—were not happy about being kept in the dark and possibly lied to. The investigating detective, Det. Julio Gil, "only learned of the cartridges being stolen from Kmart when he was called by media," said Sgt. Cassandra Davis, who is in charge of the Little Rock Police Department's public affairs unit. The detective "called Kmart and Kmart only then confirmed. He had to call them and ask about it before he learned what (the gunman) had actually taken. No one from Kmart made a report," Davis said.Read more...

The thief stabbed the assistant manager's car's front driver side tire, presumably so that the assistant manager would be occupied when the thief pointed a silver gun at him and ordered him to open the store and to then open the safe, according to the police report. The thief helped himself to the contents, including about $6,000 in cash and that day's backup disk. The disk, which was unencrypted and apparently not password-protected, included the full names, addresses, dates of birth, prescription numbers, prescribers, insurance cardholder IDs and drug names for some 788 customers, according to Sears. Read more...

One of the results of StorefrontBacktalk‘s being acquired back in December is that we are going to be expanding into coverage that goes beyond Retail IT into other areas of retail. The first example of this launched last week and is a daily newsletter and site called FierceRetail.

The site applies the same kind of perspective, analysis and bad jokes that StorefrontBacktalk has always delivered, but we can now explore issues way beyond IT. Consider our coverage of an unorthodox Apple patent, the reasoning behind the Sears Portrait shutdown, why Target’s Manatee mishap is a lot worse than it looked, Samsung’s real retail strategy, why Best Buy and Target’s Geek Squad alliance was doomed and stats showing Visa having all-but-cornered the debit market. It’s all free, of course. If you’d like to sign up, our latest thoughts will be in your Inbox early each morning.…

When Lands’ End sent out a 25-percent off E-mail promotion last week, there was a programming glitch that caused the page to simply not work. It happens. To rectify the situation, the apparel chain owned by Sears (NASDAQ:SHLD) sent a corrected version of the campaign out to shoppers, only this time the subject line said nothing more than “Oops. Here’s the working promotion.”

The message included no explanation about the non-working promotion, which caused no shortage of baffled shoppers. But was there a better way? On the one hand, had a shopper tried the earlier promotion and been frustrated, that subject line might very well prompt him or her to try again. And those already frustrated shoppers might have simply ignored a second message with the identical subject line. For recipients who had not noticed the earlier message, would the baffling message make them more or less inclined to open it? Customer service reps for Lands’ End said they were inundated with complaints about the first E-mail. But wouldn’t more of an explanation help assure shoppers that the link could be trusted?…

U.S. and Chinese paper mills say they will eventually fill the shortfall from the U.S. exit of Koehler, which has been providing about 40 percent of POS paper. But in the meantime chain execs may be expecting IT to keep stores from running out of paper. Strange as it sounds, it is IT's problem—and the second-easiest option is digital receipts.Read more...

Is it a better program (other than the strange halving of the time for a return)? Absolutely. Will it likely reduce Best Buy sales lost to showrooming? Yes. Will it eliminate all showrooming losses? Of course not. And the fact that Best Buy is trying to argue it will is mind-boggling.Read more...

This isn't complicated—the retailers most likely to adopt swipe-fee surcharges are the ones currently offering discounts for using cash, and that group doesn't include most big chains. But NRF is also fighting the interchange settlement and EPC is supporting it, which goes a long way to explain some otherwise pretty incomprehensible flaming.Read more...

The lawsuit has the tactical advantage of freezing the situation, giving Lands' End a little more time (very little time) to find a new home for its payroll system. But it's also an object lesson in software end-of-life issues—that lesson being, "when a vendor has you over a barrel, it doesn't have to play nice."Read more...

Part of that may be a novelty factor—glossy printed material isn't so much a part of young consumers' lives today. But that only explains why catalogs might have some influence, not as-big-as-Facebook influence. Given that many chains completely dumped their catalog efforts in favor of social efforts in recent years, this is a genuinely annoying result.Read more...

Runner up was Victoria's Secret, which had 18 hours of total downtime but spread it over more than 30 short outages, mostly between 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM. That smacks of maintenance outages that were actually planned, even if they weren't planned very far in advance.Read more...

The last time these Wall Street guys almost accurately picked a vanishing retail brand was Borders. It turns out that E-Commerce makes even the most zombie-like retail names harder to kill. But that's not the only thing involved.Read more...

The ongoing saga of Card Activation Technologies (CAT)—the gift card patent owner that has been suing many of the nation’s largest retailers including RadioShack, 7-Eleven, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Starbucks, JCPenney, Sears, OfficeMax, TJX, McDonald’s and Walgreens—took another bad turn for CAT as a federal appeals panel upheld on Monday (Dec. 10) a federal court that had ruled against CAT. CAT has previously said that all of its survival hopes are based on a successful appeal. The financially strapped CAT’s only choice now is to try an appeal to the full circuit or even to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court directly, both of which would be considered long shots.

Still, CAT attorney Mark Peterson said his client has about 30 days to decide its next move. The case that the Third Circuit sustained included a memorable line from Kent A. Jordan, who was serving as trial judge but who is primarily a member of the appellate panel. Jordan referred to one CAT claim, involving granting another party more time to amend a complaint, with the comment that “it takes some chutzpah to mount those objections.” It’s likely to take more than chutzpah for CAT to mount another appeal.…