Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

As Oracle and SAP engage in their half-billion battle for who will takeover retail software vendor Retek, the most obvious reasons for the fight are not the true ones.

The biggest news this month in retail has been the battle between $9 billion SAP and $3 billion Oracle to take over retail software vendor Retek, which had barely $174 million in revenue last year and less than $7.7 million of profit. But that’s pretty good compared with the prior year, when it lost a little more than $20 million.

As far as the retail customers of Retek are concerned, the current battle between Oracle and SAP for control of the Minneapolis retail technology firm would be better won by Oracle, according to an analyst report published Wednesday by the Aberdeen Group.

Years ago, I was talking with the CEO of a major privately held consumer products company. He casually mentioned that he would never again work for a publicly held company.

Asked why, he said, “For the life of me, I can’t think why I would want to publicly air all of our mistakes if I didn’t have to.”

In the middle of Albuquerque, N.M., sits a 170,000-square-foot chunk of land that is slated to be the site for a new kind of retail store: one where customers can buy a week’s worth of groceries without ever having to set foot outside their car.

On paper—and, thus far, that’s the only place this grocery store exists—this proposal seems to have plenty to offer both retailers and customers.

Under The Damned-If-You-Do category, Best Buy in-store Web displays seem to show different pricing. It’s innocuous, but it shows why regional pricing may no longer be worth the effort.

Sometimes, pushing the technology envelope is simply not worth it. The thought leaders tend to get criticized for the flaws of the new approach and, if it does take hold, they rarely get the credit years later for having taken the chance.

Are “smart-carts” state-of-the-art and cutting edge for retail technology? It’s a matter of perspective. Compared with the best European and Asian retail chains, American retailers are electronic laggards, especially in the grocery segment.

Even compared with U.S. retail technology discussions, these carts are merely deploying and productizing capabilities that have been publicly discussed for more than a year. But compared with what is actually being used—and even offered—with today’s American grocery retailers, these Fujitsu carts are positively Jetsons.

Controlling how people listen to a song on a CD is as easy as humming compared with controlling how 70,000 people every day navigate an e-commerce site, executives at Tower Records have discovered.

Like every other e-commerce outfit, Tower’s Web team makes a long list of assumptions about how people will interact with the site right before launching a new site capability. Those assumptions are often wrong because, among other reasons, the thinking process of a Web developer/designer doesn’t always mesh with the thoughts of the site’s visitors.

One of the most disheartening things for a technology journalist to learn is that a lot of readers look at magazines to see the ads.

Well, maybe not solely to look at the ads, but the fact that readers even glance at those dastardly marketing con jobs is enough to make us weep in our espressos.

A hungry consumer pulls up to the drive-through window in a California McDonald’s restaurant and places a dinner order. The person taking the order points out that the caller placed only three drink orders for four dinners and reminds the diner of a special that day on apple pie.

This might be a fairly typical fast-food—or, in industry parlance, QSR for quick-service restaurant—exchange were it not for the fact that the customer and the order-taker are dozens of miles apart, connected through a VPN-secured voice-over-IP hookup.

Speaking to an overflow crowd at the National Retail Federation’s Redefining Retail show, Metro Group CIO Zygmunt Mierdorf beamed in live footage of the company’s prototype RFID-enabled stores from Germany, showing interactive changing rooms that make clothing recommendations and have clerks bring additional pieces, a cashier shelf that instantly scans items (so the cashier doesn’t have to) and a privacy system that literally leaves the chip in the store.

When major customers walk into a Circuit City location, CIO Mike Jones wants to whisper customized sales pitches into their ears—literally.

Jones’s scenario is simple: As customers walk into the store, they receive a very light wireless headset.

You’re cleaning away papers that accumulated during the holidays and find a portable CD player that is identical to the one you use every day. It was given to you as a gift and you have no receipt, nor any clue where it was purchased.

On a whim, you take the CD player to your favorite local retailer. Customer service scans the item, reports to you the date it was purchased and the name of the retailer it was purchased from, tells you that the other retailer’s rules give you four more days to return it, and hands you a freshly printed receipt for you to use for that return.

Imagine the following scenario playing out at your favorite retail store.

You have been running all around town trying to prepare for an important formal banquet on January 11, 2005. After having worked with a sales associate at a major department store for an hour to select seven possible outfits, you lug them into a dressing room to see what might work.

Some of the nation’s largest retailers pay Paul Walsh to think about existential-sounding questions like “How cold is cold?” and “How wet is wet?”

No, Walsh isn’t a philosopher. Indeed, as a trained scientist (a meteorologist, to be precise), his answers are anything but theoretical. But it certainly is about perception.

When I thought about retail IT operations in 2005, I envisioned an eccentric, wealthy hermit who lives in a comfortable mansion in the middle of the woods.

The hermit certainly knows about the big city and all of the glorious things he could buy there, but he is content. He has what he needs and a sufficient number of things that he wants. His home is sound and he doesn’t have a heck of a lot of motivation to go out and make it fancy and state-of-the-art. Maybe someday, he thinks.

With the holiday season comes fruitcake, traffic jams and an anticipated onslaught of must-be-returned gifts from well-meaning (and possibly colorblind) friends and relatives.

But sprinkled amongst those gift-receipt-clutching consumers are what the industry considers thieves: people who deliberately use return policies to steal.

If the “Max” in Office Max is supposed to refer to the amount of time its e-commerce server takes to respond, it’s aptly named.

And Target’s target is apparently not lightning-fast e-commerce experiences. Those conclusions are courtesy of the latest round of Web traffic analysis from the folks at Keynote Systems.

For years, line-of-business managers have told IT executives that their goal is to improve efficiency. Their mission is to leverage hardware and software to do in a nanosecond what it takes human employees minutes, lunch breaks and vacations to do.

In many ways, 2004 will be seen as a technological turning point for retail: the year that many technologies that have been hyped for years started to become real. Traditionally, retail has always been a mixed barcode for being technologically advanced.

Consumers are looking for black coal to put into their brick-and-mortar retailers’ stocking this holiday season, with complaints soaring about bad customer service experiences. But those same consumers are seemingly ecstatic with online customer service.

One of the most logistically challenging situations for any large retailer is the return. Newgistics Inc., a Texas retail service firm, launched a tracking service intended to alleviate some of the uncertainty involved in the process.

Wawa CIO Neil McCarthy’s voice reveals his anger as he recounts a recent meeting he had with bank executives to complain about high credit card fees that are out of proportion with services.

Wawa’s 550 stores sell a huge amount of gasoline: about 110,000 gallons per week per store, which places it among the highest volume in the country. Typical volume for U.S. gas stations is about 40,000 gallons, McCarthy said.

When Kmart and Sears announced their plans to merge and create the nation’s third-largest retailer, it shook the retail technology world.

Although it will take months for the two retail leaders to merge their almost 3,500 stores with a projected $55 billion in annual revenue, the combined operation will have the ability to significantly influence retail technology trends.

An age-old CRM criticism is that it’s an expensive package that often delivers the information too late (long after the customer has left) and to the wrong people (back-office managers instead of salespeople on the floor).

One CRM firm introduced two packages that it claimed avoids those problems.

Reigning over 175 home entertainment stores in 21 states, Tweeter CIO Bill Morrison looks cautiously at the calendar as the year-end holidays approach.

While many of his counterparts are trying to train oceans of seasonal employees and hoping that errors don’t obliterate consumers service, goodwill and inventory accuracy, Morrison sits back, confident in the chain’s decision to forgo any customer-facing seasonal help.