Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

With causes ranging from new, low-priced vendors to needing more lanes open simultaneously, IHL Consulting Group reported that prices for typical point-of-sale base units in North America plummeted, from about $2,200 in 2002 to $950 in 2004.

On paper, it certainly must have looked like a “can’t lose” situation. Two major industry events happened and they both pointed to an obvious move: Cingular should be aggressively pushing data.

Just about one year ago, Cingular announced that it would be buying AT&T Wireless for $41 billion, creating the nation’s largest cell phone operation. Last year also saw PalmOne faring well with its Treo line of cell phone/PDA hybrids.

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.”

Webmasters no longer know what their customers are seeing when they visit their sites, and they have anti-virus, ant-spyware, anti-popup and alternative browsers to thank.

In the early Web days, all that an e-commerce site developer/programmer needed to worry about were operating system version and browser.

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.

As Chinese consumers suddenly start to embrace the retail store, orders for point of sale systems are soaring, according to a study from IHL Consulting Group.

IHL projected China’s accelerating 20 percent annual growth in 2004 would catapult it in 2005 beyond the POS sales of Germany, which is Europe’s largest POS market.

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.

Credit card companies, through consumer promotions and lower fees for retailers, have been whittling away at the last few cash-friendly refuges.

And as though George Washington needed even more disrespect to be heaped upon his picture on the one-dollar-bill, contactless payment systems are now helping to take the green out of greenbacks.

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.

As retailers prepare to migrate from bar codes to RFID, upgrade POS systems and accept wireless input from a wide range of new payment devices, it’s critical that they know that data points mean the exact same thing at all points on the supply chain.

With that goal in mind, a key retail technology standards group unveiled a series of new schemas for retail pricing data consistency.

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.

Somewhere in Arizona—they insist that their exact location be kept secret so that e-commerce bandits won’t recognize their address—sits a team of 18 Internet experts who hunt down people and companies that are either selling products illegally or are violating copyrights.

But the real work is done overnight, where a suite of homegrown applications crawls literally millions of Internet e-commerce locations, including Web sites, RSS feeds, Usenet newsgroups, private discussion groups (such as Yahoo’s), IRC chat rooms, mailing lists and spam.

As an emergency medicine physician, Dr. John D. Halamka immediately saw the life-saving potential of embedding tiny wireless RFID (radio-frequency identification) devices in people. As the CIO of the Harvard Medical School, he was naturally skeptical of such devices and wanted to test them thoroughly before recommending their adoption.

In many ways, CIOs are in the prediction business.

They must make one-, two- and sometimes even five-year plans for technology buying, when even a two-month prediction in many sectors—especially retail—is barely more accurate a predictor than a dice toss.

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.

Shoppers wanting to see a store’s neighborhood before venturing out into a potentially rundown city street corner will be able to do that by looking into a new interactive Yellow Pages sitefrom Amazon.com.

The site—to be housed at the home of Amazon subsidiary A9.com—includes data covering more than 14 million businesses.

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.

eBay has done almost everything correctly, so it’s to be expected that the Web pioneer will try to boost its margins slightly. It could issue five more price increases and it would likely still be a bargain.

eBay is in a very exclusive club of the early Web innovators who have stuck to their original playbook and been true to what makes the Web powerful. This week’s news that eBay is boosting some prices shouldn’t be a surprise, nor should the Garage Sale Goddess’ right to enhance its margins a bit.

As the retail tech industry prepared for it largest trade show, the cutting-edge nature of expected news announcements—with an emphasis on wireless, touch-screen, kiosk and PDA applications—suggested an industry that is exploring everything but committing to little.

A good example of an expected alliance is one involving IBM and some 40 companies—including Cuesol, Retek, Symbol Technologies and Triversity—that will pledge support for IBM’s Store Integration Framework. That program specializes in helping retailers to target and cater to local sales and promotional preferences.

Self-checkout may go down in retail history as the most secure insecure piece of technology ever. Wonder why the Wal-Mart bar-code thieves avoided self-checkout? They knew better.

The world of crime prevention is riddled with what—at first glance—seem to be contradictions, but are actually exercises in logic.

The fact that shoplifters nabbed $1.5 million across 19 states is not a technology, people or training problem. Rather, it shows that management needs to re-evaluate its obsession with keeping the line moving.

The most well-planned and meticulously detailed crimes are often foiled by the commonplace. The thieves might map out their route precisely, coordinating it based on when various employees come and go. But security guard No. 9 gets a flat tire that morning, shows up 35 minutes late and ruins everything.

In a scheme that leveraged a little technology but relied on inattentive cashiers, Tennessee authorities arrested two couples on charges that they used bogus bar codes to steal at least $1.5 million from hundreds of stores—some belonging to Wal-Mart—in 19 states. Although the accused are said to have spent a lot of time and effort organizing colleagues in various parts of the country, the technology portion of their scheme was quite simple.

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.