Franchisees Sue BP, Say Chain Knew Its Mandated POS Systems Double-Charged Customers And Didn’t Fix It
Written by Evan SchumanA group of franchise BP gas station owners are suing the petroleum giant, arguing that the POS systems the chain mandated were overpriced, defective, caused inventory errors and double-charged some customers while giving others a free ride. And the lawsuit further suggests that BP management knew the systems—from Retalix—were defective when they insisted they be used.
The legal attack on BP is the latest example of the evolving nature of franchisee IT politics. With BP, it’s the franchisees pushing back on a mandated POS system. But another active case—involving Burger King—is the same issue in reverse, with Burger King suing some of its franchisees for having not implemented a mandated POS system. Even Visa late last year reclassified franchises for PCI purposes, bowing to the new realities.
The issue behind almost all of these incidents is the struggle around who gets to decide IT moves within a franchisee operation. The franchisors are called owners for a reason. Ideally, the chain needs to persuade the owners of the wisdom of a suggested IT move, rather than mandating it. This speaks to the very different circumstances within different groups of store owners.
Corporate has an equally powerful case, that POS and CRM data have to be collected in the same way or else analysis and trend-spotting becomes almost impossible. It’s in the franchisees’ interest to make sure that corporate can spot those trends if they want the products to sell.
In the BP lawsuit, the installations started happening in 2009. “During beta testing of the Retalix POS system prior to the 2009 official installation, [BP and Retalix] knew or should have known of several material defects in the design and architecture of the software,” the filing said. “Despite this, [BP] insisted and required the full rollout of the Retalix POS system nationwide to all of its franchisees at ARCO, BP and AM/PM mini-market branded franchises.”
The lawsuit quoted a BP executive—William Fry, identified as the President of BP West Coast Products LLC—as saying in March 2011 that the Retalix system was “75 percent effective.” Neither the lawsuit nor one of the attorneys who filed it clarified the context of the comment, including whether that reflected Fry’s view of the system in March 2011 or at some earlier point.
The filing did, however, get specific as to the POS complaints, referring to “frequent errors, delays and downtime when Retalix is forced to go offline, resulting in a complete shutdown of the franchise location for up to several hours” and the POS system’s “inability to track purchases in which it fails to register sales and debit charges for known gasoline sales,” clarifying that “POS fails to record a deposit from some customers who purchase gas and other items.” Another concern: “inability of Retalix to keep track of inventory, in which it either attributes more or less than actual inventory levels resulting in inability to track sales.”
It also accused Retalix software of having a “propensity to double charge certain customers and not others. For example, customer number one will pump gas and his debit card will not be charged but customer number two will pump gas and be charged for his gas and customer number one’s gas purchase.” (That could be turned into a marketing plus. They could call it the BP Lottery.)
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
