Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The kiosks are now in Home, Women’s, Men’s and Footwear departments, JCPenney said, with “a few locations” placing them in Children’s departments “as a trial,” but Coultas added that “we have not yet determined if we plan to make this a permanent location for future deployments.”

Interestingly, the chain said it has no current plans to expand the number of stores using Findmore beyond the current 127 to its more than 1,100 stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. “We may add more fixtures to stores but at this time, we do not have plans to expand fixtures to additional stores outside of the 127,” Coultas said.

The kiosks are primarily designed to help find other sizes, colors, style and inventory of selected items. When a customer opts for such a purchase from JCPenney’s Web site, the home delivery is actually not free. This contrasts with the policies of other chains, including Macy’s, which just updated its free shipping policies a couple of weeks ago. If the shipment is to another store, then that actually is free.

One rather bizarre feature is an online dressing room. Why bizarre? According to the news release, its purpose is for customers to find items so that they “can then print out a page listing the items, locate the items in the store and try them on.”

Yes, that’s the ultimate in technology-fueled efficiency: Give customers a dead-tree list of items and send them on a scavenger hunt through the store trying to find them so they can carry the bundles into a very non-virtual dressing room. The idea of listing related products is a good one. But unless there’s more to this “online dressing room” concept than was announced, we think we’ll stick with bizarre.

Although not intended to be a line-buster, the kiosk will face similar issues to other machines intended to move payment processing away from the traditional POS station. Customers will be asked to type in their personal information (such as address) into the machine, where the display will be obscured by asterisks.

But if thieves positioned themselves—or tiny cameras—precisely enough to focus on the keyboard of the not easily moved kiosk, data theft—especially identity-theft type of data—could still happen. One response? Fight fire with fire or, in this case, cameras with cameras. Security cameras focusing, in an obvious way, on the area surrounding the kiosk could discourage such thefts.