Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

“Imagine if every time I touched a doorknob or a wine glass, I inadvertently transmitted my PIN number?” Albrecht asked.

Pay By Touch technology has gotten more sophisticated in recent years, and various security challenges to fingerprint authentication?from Gummi Fingers to using severed fingers?may no longer work.

Citing capabilities detailed in one of the company’s patents, Riordan said many security threats won’t fool its systems. “There’s a component of how this works that requires it be a live finger. There needs to be blood pulsing through it,” she said.

The retail IT community is still enthusiastic about the long-term potential of biometric authentication for checkout, and the initial implementation hiccups are seen as the natural flow of any new technology.

Vendors have a similar attitude towards RFID technology, seeing huge potential supply chain savings as outweighing deployment issues.

A key reason that retailers want biometric authentication to ultimately work involves the cost of payment systems in their various forms, including labor costs and processing fees; the need to keep checkout lines moving; and the potential sophistication of CRM data and how easily it can be leveraged into more sales and reduced costs.

At Piggly Wiggly, for example, checks are considered to be the most costly means of payment. That’s not merely because of the additional time consumers need to use them, but because of bounced checks (accidental as well as deliberate) and the costly systems in place to minimize them.

The second most expensive means of payment is cash.

The payment must be counted at checkout, the total amount of cash must be painstakingly counted and recounted at the end of the shift, and the potential for theft is higher because it is considerably easier to steal, resulting in even more expensive security procedures and devices for monitoring and controlling cash activities.

The anonymity of cash is also a concern for retailers because it undermines CRM efforts, making it the most unstrategic means of getting paid.

That partially explains why Piggly Wiggly is so interested in biometric checkout options. In October, for example, 13.87 percent of all customer transactions were done by check, accounting for 7.5 percent of all sales dollars that month, Bolt said, while 64 percent of all transactions involved a cash payment, representing 46 percent of all revenue the store took in that month.