Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

“However, there is a concern that as we begin using the body to make payments instead of cash or plastic, we could be paving the way for a system like that predicted in the Bible, where something related to one’s body ? is needed to perform the authentication necessary to make a purchase.”

Many retailers have a difficult time dealing with such biblical issues, as they see biometric authentication as simply a time-saving alternative to paper identification that is also more easily tied into CRM (customer relationship management) and payment systems.

The benefits of biometric authentication for retailers—and, to a lesser extent, for consumers—relate to speed and better information management. Albertson’s is one of the larger retail chains testing the technology today, with Wal-Mart, Target and Costco reportedly testing as well.

A customer paying with a credit/debit card often has to fish the card out of a wallet or purse, have the magstripe swiped, sometimes multiple times before a reading is accepted, and wait for a receipt to be printed and then signed.

Check-writing customers will often delay the checkout line even more, as the time it takes to write a check and find and have the cashier examine one or two forms of identification is not inconsequential.

The biometric checkout is designed to require the customer to quickly present a finger for identification. The almost instantaneous authentication can replace a payment card and a loyalty card. On the CRM front, it would also positively associate specific purchases with a specific customer.

As a practical matter, Piggly Wiggly’s Bolt said, the fingerprint approach has some limited drawbacks, beyond potentially facilitating Armageddon close-out sales transactions.

Chief among those drawbacks is that many people simply cannot be fingerprinted. That’s the case for some people with thin skin, including those who have it as part of their genetic makeup as well as those who use cleaning chemicals extensively or take a wide range of prescription drugs that slightly thin the skin while treating various autoimmune ailments.

People who have injured their fingers even slightly—perhaps with a knife scrape—can find their prints become either unreadable or altered enough to cause the system to reject the purchase. Also, people whose fingers have limited movement sometimes cannot be scanned properly.

“Our experience has been that the elderly population and construction workers have difficulty enrolling” and therefore in having transactions processed, Bolt said. “You put one scratch on the fingerprint and it’s not going to read it.”

She said many of those issues can be addressed with more attention at the point of enrollment. Trained enrollers can apply more—or sometimes less—pressure from the fingers to extract more usable scans, she said, and they can also try scanning more than one finger.