Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The $5 billion 72-store grocery chain Wegmans is trying a very focused trial this Fall. It will offer a kiosk at one store that will offer to scan one specific type of fruit–berries–from one distributor. The point of the kiosk is to tell consumers–via a barcode scan–the exact farm that the berries are from.

A spokesperson for the chain, Jo Natalie, was quoted in The Packer as saying that the trial “will ensure confidence in product safety.” But it’s not clear why such data would be of any value to consumers. At best, consumers may hear something on the news about avoiding produce from a particular country, but that would likely be clear on the printed label or the store’s signage. What consumer would even know the significance of one farm versus another? It’s an interesting trial, but the value to the consumer seems rather amorphous. …

It’s a sad lesson in automation that the more we trust machines to handle customers directly, the more we discover that, yes, there actually can exist entities that are sloppier than apathetic customer service reps. As retailers embrace self-attendant kiosks more, IT should take note of an incident this week at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.

The kiosk apparently granted a woman access to a supposedly secure off-limits area of the terminal for more than 40 hours. That’s a full workweek for a certified terrorist, if anyone’s keeping track. The kiosk “mistakenly (gave the customer) a boarding pass in the name of a passenger whose surname was the same as hers and who was to have taken the same flight as her. As the carrier’s self-service check-in system was not linked to its traditional check-in counter, two boarding passes were issued in the same passenger’s name,” according to this detailed report from the Central News Agency carried in the ETaiwanNews. “As to why she was able to remain in a controlled area for over 40 hours, the officer said most likely the immigration officers did not carefully check whether the name on the boarding pass was exactly the same as that of the passport holder.”…

The FTC said the highly intrusive application would "monitor consumers’ online secure sessions–including sessions on third parties’ Web sites–and collect information transmitted in those sessions, such as the contents of shopping carts, online bank statements, drug prescription records, video rental records, library borrowing histories, and the sender, recipient, subject, and size for web-based E-mails. The software would also track some computer activities that were not related to the Internet."Read more...

But new numbers just for May—showing Macy's online hitting 12.2 percent sales increases, compared with a 9.1 percent drop for in-store, which is a massive 21.3 percent spread for that month's $1.74 billion in revenue—make it hard to view those figures as anything other than powerful E-Commerce performance.Read more...

An alliance between CBS Outdoor and Clustra is testing out such an approach using iPhones as the control devices. Will it deliver more eyeballs and ultimately better sales of whatever is being marketed? And could the same approach also work in a mall or department small, where the crowds are presumably much smaller?Read more...

When former State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, were arrested and charged this week with spying for Cuba for 30 years, the big question in Washington was “How did they get away with for it for so long?” It seems that retail technology—specifically loss-prevention closed-circuit cameras—may have played a small role.

According to a federal indictment unsealed Friday (June 5), Gwendolyn Myers said that “her favorite way of passing information involved the changing of shopping carts in a grocery store because it ‘was easy enough to do.'” She added that she “wouldn’t do it now. They have cameras but they didn’t then.” So the next time you’re putting together an ROI argument for buying more security cameras, you can officially add “national security” and “thwarting enemy spies trying to fund terrorism” to your PowerPoint. For American chains, do it around July 4th and how could you possibly be turned down? …

When running a trial for a new technology and trying to get consumers to participate, the last weapon in a retailer’s arsenal to be used will always be price discounts. The hesitation is logical for any company with such razor-thin margins and falling revenue, but it’s also radically illogical given that price discounts are overwhelmingly the best way to change consumer behavior. If a merchant is asking customers to step out of their comfort zones, something of concrete value has to be offered.

After years of resistance, we’re now seeing a handful of retailers trying discounts. The Dairy Queen RFID mobile coupon trial is offering discounts only for those customers willing to try the chain’s new RFID tags. This week comes word of a kiosk ordering trial at the Jack In The Box restaurant chain where consumers are given “a free item or free upgrade with each kiosk order during the program’s introduction,” according to this QSR Magazine story.…

The move has huge potential mostly because, from the consumer's perspective, it's so non-interruptive. Consumers are already in the habit of using self-service beverage machines at fast-food facilities, so it should encounter almost no resistance. All that will be visibly different is a much greater amount of beverage choice. As long as the machine's interface is clean, that shouldn't be a problem. But if the options look—even at a glance—overly complicated or time-consuming, things could turn ugly quickly.Read more...

Hitwise, an online measurement firm that is usually quite reliable, issued a statement Wednesday (June 3) that CircuitCity.com’s relaunch marked a 230 percent increase from the prior week and that 84 percent of its visitors had not visited in the past 30 days.

Somehow, I wonder if the fact that the company had gone bankrupt, shut everything down and wasn’t offering anything on its Web site for months might have skewed the comparison numbers a bit. This is just another in our continuing series called “Web stats are great but they need an awful lot of context to mean anything.” …

Victoria's Secret's new mobile experiment is more of an adjunct to its catalogue (paper and online), with the mobile app needing a catalogue number before an item can be purchased and tracked.Read more...

But when those consumers return to that Dairy Queen with those tags stuck to their wallets, their watchbands or the back of their cellphones, identical those tags shall be no more. Given the differing purchase histories of each customer, the tags will deliver sharply different discounts and offers. In effect, the tags will serve as digital coupons as well as makeshift CRM/loyalty programs.Read more...

Ahold Information Services Vice President of Applications Development Alan Williams argued that a January replacement of the current UPC-A barcode with the DataBar "would create a significant hardship for a large number of retailers." Ahold, a Netherlands-based grocery chain operator with sales of $40 billion, has about 1,400 stores in the U.S. including Stop&Shop and Giant.Read more...

"We're talking about companies opting to store and manage more credit card and other confidential data than necessary, and we suspect protecting jobs in technology, compliance and finance is the main reason for this," Taylor writes. "But is this necessarily bad?"Read more...

It’s well known that temperature-detecting active RFID tags have extreme value with perishable goods transportation, but a new study delves into microclimates, which indicates subtle differences of temperature in different parts of the same pallet. The Aim Global story looks at the IT ROI implications and whether it could change the business case for active tags.

“Each link in the cold chain must have the ability to reject partial shipments based on temperature data. This could make it either more expensive for the supplier (because some goods are now being rejected that had previously been accepted) or less expensive (because whole shipments are not rejected because of a single temperature reading). In either case, there would be a financial incentive to more closely monitor temperature and other critical conditions,” the story reported. “Customer refusals or charge-backs for less-than-fresh goods might provide an incentive for processors to pressure growers/packers to tag individual cases so that improper handling at the beginning of the supply chain does not adversely affect a processor’s or distributor’s downstream revenues.”…

A Microsoft engineer is being quoted as questioning the safety of RFID tags and whether the tags could be wirelessly attacked. “Technically speaking, if a virus broadcasts itself utilizing a wireless data transfer protocol and another system accepts this transmission and transfers control to the received data, then we may have a case of an ‘airborne’ infection,” said Oleg Petrovsky, senior software development engineer at Microsoft, according to a report in Secure Computing. (Microsoft promised to comment, but didn’t respond by deadline.)

“The most plausible case scenario might include a virus that utilizes a vulnerability in the driver of a wireless device or a service using either TCP/IP or Bluetooth protocols. However, despite the growing numbers of wireless devices, including smartphones, PDAs and 2G, 2.5G, 3G and GPRM network services, so far we’ve been fortunate to not have outbreaks of this nature.”…

The most frightening—and fun—thing about social networking and retail integration is the speed with which it changes. That means that retailers must have a fine-tuned crystal ball into what’s a year or two down the road so it can launch and take advantage of trends before they’ve died out. A wonderful opinion column in Mashable details several interesting technologies that may form some nearterm online innovations. One good example is where Twitter might be headed.

“It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.” Oddly enough, they’re absolutely right. Well worth a read if you need to plot out where E-Commerce is headed.…

Sears opened in May its MyGofer trial store, a drive-through approach for picking up merchandise purchased online. But preliminary reviews have been unhappy, with TheStreet.com calling it “a bad cross between Amazon and Dairy Barn.” A prominent Chicago retail consultant questioned why consumers wouldn’t simply pick up their online products at an existing Sears store.

“That’s where it totally breaks down for me. Why would I change my behavior to go here?” asked Mara Devitt, a partner at Chicago-based McMillan Doolittle, who also complained about the quality of the site that is connected with the new venture. “It’s the most frustrating Web experience,” she said, citing as an example that it offered no product dimensions.…

In the ongoing saga that is the Heartland data breach, a group that tracks such things has now tallied that at least 656 financial institutions have been impacted.

“The tally reflects many banks and credit unions with losses of thousands of dollars to fraud, along with the costs associated with monitoring and card replacement, which has led to several class action suits being filed against the payments processor” said the story in BankInfoSecurity.…

To be clear, the credit- and debit-card data sharing that Sears is accused of sharing happened between Sept. 9, 1995, and June 22, 2001, long before PCI even existed. But such a thing could never happen today, in our PCI-compliant environment, right? Think again, Breach Boy.Read more...

IT may not the only ones allergic to integrating new POS systems. A report in the May 28 New England Journal of Medicine found that some cashiers have been showing asthma symptoms after new POS installations, as they apparently react to chemicals on the receipt paper.

“The machines print on thermal paper coated with a chemical called N-propyl-acrylamide and acrylate tints,” said a report on the article in Health Day. “After performing all tests, we demonstrated that our patient was sensitized, meaning she is allergic to a specific substance, in this case, acrylates contained in the thermal paper.” Now there’s a TCO factor that most IT departments would have overlooked: the potential for increased sick time and lower productivity. Maybe upgrade the POS system but keep the old printers?…

But the rollout Tuesday (May 26) from the Papa Johns global chain of 3,404 pizzerias takes it one step farther. Yes, it's generally just glitz and icing, but it integrates webcams that will literally interact with pizza boxes.Read more...

The initial version of the kiosks collect payment card information as well as drivers license data. Even setting aside the potential future POS/CRM access, the payment and highly-sensitive driver's license data will force some of that debate right away. How secure are the kiosks? Who is ultimately responsible in the event of a security breach, both from a legal and PCI perspective?Read more...

Although it's always difficult to accurately project what new IT leaders will do with their new gigs, there are indications that neither exec is likely to create major ripples, at least not in the nearterm. At Best Buy, the 41-year-old Roberts technically replaces Bob Willett, who has held the CIO title for years and has been a senior IT leader at Best Buy since April 2004. But Willett has been holding dual titles, serving as both the full chain's CIO and CEO of Best Buy International. Willett will continue as CEO of Best Buy International and, most critically, Roberts will continue to report directly to Willett. When a new executive is reporting into the executive being replaced, that's rarely followed by a radical shift in strategy.Read more...

"We all know that PCI compliance creates dividing lines," said GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor. "Flat networks must be segmented. The number of databases that store—and applications that use—cardholder data needs to be reduced and the number of persons with full card number access needs to be reduced as well. The whole process of separating the “haves” from the “have nots” often leads to arguments and requires extensive justification on the part of those who maintain they must have the ability to see unencrypted card data in order to do their job."Read more...

According to officials involved in the case, Macy's is saying that it has only been able to locate about 40 percent of the data involving some 2,900 tainted necklaces sold. Let's set aside for the moment the possibility that Macy's officials are being less than candid with the L.A. officials because they simply don't want to reveal the data. If we assume that they are being absolutely candid, what does it say about their data management?Read more...