Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Starbucks has just issued an extensive report detailing all of the things it has done to support the environment. But one of the key environmentally friendly moves the company has made—its mobile payment effort—is curiously missing. Hey, if you’re going to get down to talking about using special lightbulbs, you would think that the deadtree-saving nature of not having printed receipts for those thousands of mobile purchases would at least get a bullet or two.

Starbucks, by the way, does deserve kudos for the candid way it handled the report. On the top of a chart with its goals and progress, it chose to lead with an item where it missed its goal—more than 15 times over. Its first goal was “to reduce energy consumption by 25 percent in our company-owned stores by 2010” and the reality: “Our electricity use decreased by 1.6 percent in company-owned stories in 2010.” The chain gave that goal a “did not achieve” icon. (Presumably, the “we didn’t even come bloody close” icon was too large.)…

We often poke fun at some of the leaders in the retail space. But every now and then, it’s only fair to point out true creativity. Amazon has a nasty habit of deploying really well thought-out efforts. On Wednesday (April 20), the E-tailer rolled out another of these “that’s such an obvious idea, that no one delivered” moments. Amazon launched library lending for its Kindle books. That’s not the cool part, though. No, these loaned literary lengths remember notes and pages you’ve looked at—and it will show them to you (and only to you) the next time you take them out.

The feature, which is slated to launch “later this year,” will only work at some 11,000 U.S. libraries. “If a Kindle book is checked out again or that book is purchased from Amazon, all of a customer’s annotations and bookmarks will be preserved,” said Kindle Director Jay Marine. “Normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library. Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.” Every now and then, Amazon reminds us why it is still the E-Commerce leader.…

As retailers struggle with geolocation, it turns out that Apple has already done the heavy lifting when it comes to iPhone users. On Wednesday (April 20), two U.K. researchers announced that they found an unencrypted iPhone database that records the user’s location (by latitude and longitude) as many as 100 times each day, based on cell towers, in addition to IP addresses of Wi-Fi access points the phone has connected to and data from geofencing applications. The downside: Some data is wildly inaccurate, and Apple isn’t saying why it’s being stored for as long as a year.

Of course, if there’s a way to create potential privacy problems, Apple will find it—from preserving every iPhone keystroke to recording the user’s heartbeat and guessing the user’s mode of transportation. Unfortunately, because Apple hasn’t explained why this location data is being kept (dating back to whenever iOS 4 was installed on the phone), retailers can’t count on the data being available for anything useful. But maybe Apple just likes keeping track of where its users have been—and always with their best interest at heart. If it was anyone else, this would sound like stalking.…

A blind call-center worker on April 12 sued a Maryland county government over a job downgrade and pay cut after the county merged its non-emergency call centers but didn’t preserve screen-reading technology. Yasmin Reyazuddin, a multilingual information specialist, said she researched the necessary configuration changes after the county bought Oracle’s Seibel CRM system, but when she raised questions about the switchover she was demoted, moved to a non-call center job and told her pay would be reduced. She wasn’t even allowed to try the system to see if she could use it anyway.

Wait—there’s a call-center employee who’s already using assistive technology, is capable of researching whether the new system can be made accessible (according to Oracle’s documentation, it can) and is willing to look for a workaround for any problems. And that’s the employee IT can’t figure out how to accommodate in the project plan? That isn’t an employee you bury. You loan her to IT to figure out the cheapest way to get a screen reader working and then end up collecting good publicity instead of a federal lawsuit.…

Retailers can deal with social media in three ways. The first choice is that they can create their own area where they try and attract shoppers and say tons of great stuff about themselves. Let's call that the Commercial approach. Second, they can get lots of people to visit big, established social sites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), where they can casually say lots of nice stuff about the retailer. This would be the Viral approach. The third way is to shut-up and studiously watch what everyone is saying, from every corner of social media. That's the Winning approach—and it's what Wal-Mart seems to be doing with its acquisition—because the first chain that masters hearing what those folk are all saying will have the keys to the most profitable merchandising and marketing decisions ever.Read more...

The real difference in time—and there truly is one—has nothing to do with IT, authentication or any other technological issue. It's the practical reality that shoppers tend to keep credit and debit cards buried deep within their wallet/pocketbook, whereas they tend to either have their mobile phone in their hand or in a convenient outer pocket, easily within Bluetooth range. That extends the debate from whether a swipe or a wave is faster to whether the entire mobile payment process is easier and faster because of how people use mobile phones.Read more...

Some examples from the report: "Mary is tired of remembering dozens of usernames and passwords, so she obtains a digital credential from her Internet service provider that is stored on a smartcard." So anyone who steals (or clones) her smartcard can now do all of those things pretending to be her? Yeah, that's a hugeimprovement. Not for Mary but for any cyberthief.Read more...

Case in point: JCPenney. "If we could figure out our rewards customers, it'd be a big win," said CIO Ed Robben. "If I want to be more personalized, I've got to know you're there. You're either checking in with us as you come in, or we're sensing you as you come into a store and are able to react to that. Most everybody's going to have GSM and 3G turned on. They may not have their Wi-Fi turned on. I just don't know that that's reliable enough for where we'd want to detect the customer."Read more...

That disconnect between what developers built and what customers expected would have been unthinkable as recently as five years ago, when JCPenney's strategy was to use its Web site to drive customers to stores. But when a skunkworks team began work on the kiosk in the summer of 2009, the goal was to flip that, so in-store customers who couldn't find exactly what they needed could check the expanded assortment online—in Robben's words, "to extend the aisle to the online assortment."Read more...

Of course, testing RFID on just a few items means it's useless at checkout time—unless everything has a tag, you still need scanners for the items that don't. But it also means instead of trying to speed checkout, RFID is only being used to keep shelves stocked in specific categories of goods. By dumping the end-to-end goal, it may be possible to get more real leverage out of RFID—and keep the cost and supplier headaches down, too.Read more...

A wonderful New York Times piece a few days ago observed a decline in the number of fragrance spritzers roaming department stores. (Yeah, I am also guessing it was a slow news day.) “But today there’s growing recognition in the industry that aggressive spritzing offends too many potential customers. At a handful of department stores, fragrance demonstrators who pounce, spray and sell hard are being tamed. They may still flood the floor for debuts and other special events, but they are being gradually replaced by salesclerks who actually ask customers what scents they prefer and—gasp—listen to the reply.”

One has to wonder: Is the perfume spritzer potentially a role that a polite kiosk could take over? By its very nature, it would offer to smell up customers who approached it. It could also offer a stunningly wide range of perfume options, with customers asked to place their hands under a gentle spraying device. Would an automated perfume salesperson be an improvement? For anyone who has ever been sneak-sprayed, the answer is not difficult at all.…

"The RFID antenna can be placed in the touch sensor panel, such that the touch sensor panel can now additionally function as an RFID transponder. No separate space-consuming RFID antenna is necessary. In one embodiment, loops (single or multiple) forming the loop antenna of the RFID circuit (for either reader or tag applications) can be formed from metal on the same layer as metal traces formed in the borders of a substrate," the filing said before describing its potential uses.Read more...

When the Epsilon E-mail database nightmare exploded earlier this month, the most comforting thought offered by many was that it was only E-mail addresses. Therefore, the comforting thought continued, the worst outcome would merely be an increase in SPAM. Not that many bought that line even initially, but one of the latest breach victims—GlaxoSmithKline—put that theory to rest.

The medical substance giant pointed out to its customers that their E-mail addresses were stored in such a way as to indicate which sites they visited. That could easily reveal the disease that was afflicting most of those visitors. This reminds us that the combination of an E-mail address and a visited domain can reveal quite a bit. What about Victoria’s Secret’s visitors? Or the list from 1-800-Flowers, from the perspective of a bride who knows that she certainly hasn’t received any flowers recently? Or any other specialty domain? Just a thought the next time someone casually mentions that Epsilon was just an E-mail list breach.…

When Best Buy announced to the world that it—along with many other chains—had exposed some of its customer E-mail addresses by retaining Epsilon, it did so in the traditional proper fashion. But when Best Buy sent an E-mail advisory to its customers, someone at Best Buy thought that adding a commercial in the middle of the breach notice was a good idea.

In the middle of Best Buy’s advisory to customers, someone added a plug for the Geek Squad in the letter signed by Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge. “As our experts at Geek Squad would tell you, be very cautious when opening links or attachments from unknown senders,” the letter said. This tactic raises two issues. First, is the middle of a somber breach notification really where you want a backup group to start humming your jingle? Second, as you are pointing out a major privacy disaster, is this the best time to remind people that you own Geek Squad? Isn’t that like offering children safety tips for Halloween and using those tips to announce you’ve hired John Wayne Gacy as head of security?…

The first reaction I had was, "This is one problem that will go away when real-time inventory is universal and available on mobile devices." Then the cynical side of me took over (that's the side with an historically much better batting average). If a chain's management decides that it wants to fool customers about inventory levels—for a wide range of nefarious reasons—wouldn't real-time inventory be the most marvelous and efficient way to do it?Read more...

Wal-Mart's announcement made it one of the first major chains to do away with the need for the customer to produce the dead-tree advertisement that Wal-Mart is being asked to match. But that paper document is being replaced—to a major degree—with associate discretion. Will shoppers be happy trading greater convenience for less consistency? The price-match change is part of a much bigger campaign, where Wal-Mart is trying to regain its low-price reputation. The chain is characterizing the price-match policy as "simplifying" and issued a statement that clearly said "customers do not have to bring in a competitor's advertisement. If customers find a lower advertised price, we'll match it at the register."Read more...

Gonzalez doesn't allege that any government employee ever asked—or authorized—him to do any of the break-ins for which he pled guilty. His position is more generic, that he needed to do these types of break-ins to maintain his skills so he would be of continued use to the government. In other words, he broke into those retail networks because he's a patriot.Read more...

Contractual obligations would have almost certainly prohibited Epsilon from trying such an effort, unless you think that Best Buy would have had no objection to letting Amazon and Target know which customers they share. But the thieves, however, have no such obligation—not that they would likely care about legal niceties such as contracts and criminal laws. Read more...

StorefrontBacktalk will launch its Premium Edition on April 18, just four days from now, on Monday. The reason we’re mentioning this again is to remind everyone that we are offering special 50 percent off pre-launch pricing. In other words, the exact same Premium service on April 18 will cost half as much on April 17. If you want to still have full access to all of our top stories (and all of the other goodies that come with the Premium subscription), doing it now is the cost-effective move.

Our site license options are also half-off during the pre-launch period (which has barely four days left). Our fear is that many readers will not focus on this until April 18, when they start running into firewalls when they try to read key stories and columns. And when they then subscribe, they won’t be able to take advantage of the pre-launch deals. The pre-launch deals were created specifically to give our long-time readers a break, so we want to make sure we do everything we can to remind everyone before it’s too late. To take advantage of our pre-launch deal, please click here.…

As that exec pointed out in a recent conversation, "Mobile POS is all trendy and cool right now, but it may not be the right answer to your problem." On the other hand, the possibilities don't have to be endless, especially if you start from what it's practical for mobile devices to do in your stores instead of starting with a device and imagining the possibilities.Read more...

That doesn't mean mobile payments will be useless to retailers, says Columnist Nick Holland. But it's time to stop pinning retail hopes on the most boring part of mobile commerce.Read more...

Almost always with a data breach or hack, pens Legal Columnist Mark Rasch, some other party has contributed in some way, to either facilitate or exacerbate the breach. The question is, is it worth it to sue? Unfortunately, in most cases, the answer is no. A few recent breaches may be illustrative. Last week, we wrote about a .pdf document of a company that was placed in a Web-accessible location that was not intended to be public. Think of this as leaving an important document in an unlocked office adjacent to your retail location. The public "can" but "shouldn't" go there. Read more...

On March 31, China’s largest search engine, Baidu, said it would shutter its E-Commerce shop. A Baidu official said the closing of the site, called Youa, “should not be seen as Baidu withdrawing from the E-Commerce scene,” but it’s awfully hard to interpret the move as anything else. The official said that Baidu was working on “a new E-Commerce platform product which will suit users better,” said a Reuters story. But that doesn’t change the fact that China’s consumers won’t be able to make purchases from Baidu for an unspecified—and quite likely lengthy—time.

Instead of shaking up China’s E-tail environment, this move is actually more likely to cement it. The chief rival to Youa had been Taobao, the E-Commerce site from Alibaba, which already had a better than 70 percent online marketshare. Youa officials asked its customers to move to Rakuten China, which is a joint venture with Baidu and Rakuten (Japan’s largest E-tailer). From the U.S. retail perspective, this consolidation might make the half-billion Chinese E-Commerce consumers more open to global alternatives. Then again, as Google has discovered, China’s government can create some serious hurdles if it wants to. …

Never before has a tax increase—a sales tax increase, to be precise—been so easily accepted by taxpayers, with hardly a newspaper editorial or a consumer group protesting. Rightly or wrongly (OK, it's wrongly), consumers in those states have been avoiding paying state sales tax and that's about to end. We would have expected at least a whimper from consumer groups. But even more surprising than the silence from consumer advocates (including newspapers and politicians seeking re-election) is the remarkably muted defense from the E-tail community, beyond Amazon.Read more...

Retailers looking to tie into the vast social network community are certainly connecting with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in every way possible. Facebook’s popularity is well known, but the most recent numbers from a Harvard University poll put some of the social utility’s numbers into a ludicrous area. For example, the survey found Facebook accounts belonging to literally 90 percent of four-year college students and 80 percent of all 18- to 29-year-olds. That compares with 31 percent and 24 percent, respectively, for Twitter accounts.

Think about it. The idea that 90 percent of any group—especially one as diverse as college students—would sign up for one company’s online service is pretty staggering. We’re not sure whether that’s more impressive than 80 percent of the absurdly diverse 18- to 29-year-olds, but both are staggering. And we haven’t seen any service cornering the market in a lot of years. For good or bad, it’s a little refreshing. …