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Being one of the world's leading advocates for RFID hasn't shielded Tesco—nor Wal-Mart, for that matter—from feeling RFID's growing pains. While Tesco has been playing the typical chicken-and-egg game with suppliers on who will initially fund tagging all products, it's had to quietly cut back its RFID efforts as it is trying to work with European UHF regulations, said Raghu Das, CEO of European RFID consulting firm IDTechEx. Tesco has been enjoying a strong four percent revenue boost from RFID-enabled inventory improvements, but it's been applying the tags by hand, which is not a tactic that can be continued indefinitely. Tesco, which ordered 2,000 RFID readers just two years ago, is in the RFID game for the longterm and is begging suppliers to take a more aggressive position. But, Das reports, they have had to sharply pull back RFID efforts because of reader problems that relate to UHF regulations from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The problem involves the standard's approach to LBT (Listen Before Talk, which is a concept my 8-year-old daughter also has issues with). LBT's intent is to make sure that readers send out signals and listen for any other nearby readers on a similar frequency, to avoid interference. But, Das said, the standard's efforts to generously avoid interference has caused Tesco readers to hear other readers as far as two kilometers away, which could easily include the readers at other retailers in addition to Tesco's own readers. "Outside the U.S., the UHF regulations are in a shambles," Das said, adding that Germany's independent efforts means that this problem is not an issue for the Metro Group. Italy has its own UHF issues, he said, because the military won't let many retailers use the necessary frequencies. The U.K.'s Marks & Spencer is faring much better because of the nature of its operations. Because they make their own clothes, they can avoid many of the supplier hesitations and their liberal use of small handheld readers means that the UHF problems are less of a concern. In other Tesco news, NCR on Wednesday announced that the chain—which is already the largest user of self-checkout systems in Europe—had purchased an unspecified number of additional self-checkout systems. It will allow Tesco to install self-checkout "in more than 50 percent of the front-end lanes at the Bishopsgate Metro store in London," the NCR statement said.
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With the many new self-checkout offerings being introduced this week from the likes of IBM, NCR and Fujitsu, it's not a bad idea to focus on what will truly decide whether these machines do anything to help retailers.
With the nation's largest casino town as its backdrop, IBM and NCR gambled that the ho-hum growth in self-checkout can become a winner if the systems are moved away from the front-of-the-store checkout lanes and moved back toward the deli, bakery and even in the middle of the cereal aisle. All in all, I'd rather take my chances at rolling a 10 the hard way.
Trying to collect some innocuous-sounding information from self-checkout customers, a self-checkout system at a Maryland Home Depot instead accidentally got itself embroiled in a privacy controversy.
The Florida librarian and data breach victim who successfully took Wells-Fargo and Sprint Nextel to small claims court was paid this week, something that some data breach observers doubted would ever happen.
With its sites being unavailable for barely one hour over four months, MySpace has the best uptime of any major social networking site and Twitter (more than 37 hours of downtime during the same period) has the worst.
London-based Marks & Spencer is the RFID tag champ. Attaching 350 million a year to items of clothing, they even blow past Wal-Mart when it comes to tagging individual items. Unfortunately, each and every one of those tags might have used the wrong technology.
GuestView Columnist David Taylor this week discovered that there's a lot more than token opposition to tokenization. One of the concerns is that companies have already spent money on encryption.
Microsoft on Saturday (May 3) gave up its efforts to acquire Yahoo, declaring such an effort too expensive. "Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.
Rite Aid on May 1 announced an extensive set of E-Commerce and POS changes to accommodate visually-impaired consumers, admittedly under an implied litigation threat from advocacy groups. The $24 billion 5,000-store pharmacy chain joins an expanding list of national retailers who have agreed to make such changes, including 7-Eleven, RadioShack, Safeway, Trader Joe's and Wal-Mart.
As retailers continue to experiment with mobile commerce, one potential problem is when mobile customers prove to be truly mobile. Let's say a national chain sends an E-mail blast to the cellphones of 10,000 Boston-area customers, inviting them to visit the store for a free sample on Wednesday.
Like it or not (place this father defiantly in the "not" category), children are using the Internet's social network sites at a younger age, with retail marketers hovering close by. How young? New stats show 17 percent of boys aged 10-12 used such sites last year, which is more than double the 8 percent who used social sites in 2006, according to the Harris Poll.
This wonderful piece comes courtesy of that time-honored daily newspaper tradition, the police blotter. A woman walks up to an ATM at a Hannaford's grocery store. She connects a laptop to the ATM until an alarm goes off, at which point she packs up and leaves.
With an eye on retailers having to juggle payment systems between many varied environments—far beyond merely online and in-store—a National Retail Federation division this week introduced a set of guidelines called the Retail Transaction Interface.
With a privacy invasion trial about to begin, Best Buy's IT department will be conducting more frequent remote audits of the chain's Geek Squad tech support department.
Microsoft is "leaning toward going hostile in its pursuit of Yahoo," with an announcement "likely" on May 2.
GuestView Columnist David Taylor this week suggests that, today, only a small minority of retailers says that they are getting much value from their security investments. Examples abound: Intrusion alerts that are ignored due to lack of staff, firewalls with rules that are out of date, intrusion detection systems that have not been tuned to minimize the false positives and encryption keys that are never changed. Fixing this stuff is not expensive, but it's not fun either.
Google says it has concocted a better way of searching for Web images, one that involves image-recognition to "see" what the image depicts as opposed to just reading the accompanying text. This technique, called Visual Rank, has tremendous potential to shake up E-Commerce, which heavily relies on product images.
Hannaford CIO Bill Homa, overseeing a data breach probe that exposed some 4.2 million payment cards, said this week that his grocery chain needs to go well beyond PCI to try and be secure, an effort he predicted would cost his department millions of dollars "but not tens of millions."
Pizza Hut is taking the "other people who bought also liked" approach mastered by Amazon.com and is trying to apply it to pizza and breadsticks and their own Web site. The service initially sounded like an ordinary Web upsell package, but a demo of the service suggested it might be more sophisticated than that.
The E-Commerce folk over at the National Retail Federation—Shop.org—are not so quietly putting out feelers for a new VP gig to pull in other e-tailers.
Wal-Mart executives this week promised Arkansas legislators that any product with a radio tag would be clearly labeled, as the retail giant tries to put the inventory-tracking devices on all products sold at Sam's Clubs by 2010.
A difficult to duplicate RFID chip? That's the claim of an RFID startup, which is using MEMs resonators to create a unique signal, or "voiceprint," which can't be cloned and can be used to authenticate the chip.
EBay's PayPal is following the path set by other alternative payment players and is starting to appear in physical stores. It's not a huge chain, but it's a start. Moosejaw Mountaineering and its seven stores will now accept PayPal and the chain is also starting to use in-store kiosks to display online customer reviews.
We've been seeing a bizarre trend this national recession. It seems to be hitting hard the companies that expected to be hit, the ones that cut back spending in anticipation of the downturn. Lo and behold, after cutting back on customer service and marketing programs, they see revenues fall. Did they correctly predict the sales drop or did they unintentionally cause the sales drop?
Starbucks on April 23 cut back its financial projections for the year, citing continuing declines in its store traffic, especially in California and Florida. This is announced just a few weeks after Starbucks said it would shake up its Web presence.
China POS shipments soared some 19 percent last year, figures that show China's retailers quickly becoming some of the biggest POS purchasers in the world, according to a new global POS report from consultancy IHL Group.
GuestView Columnist David Taylor this week argues that one of the hardest parts of extending PCI controls to other confidential data is the application of Identity and Access Management (IAM) that crosses applications and platforms, without encountering the "analysis paralyses" that comes with trying to implement Single Sign-on.
If there's one thing that the last year of credit card catastrophes has made undeniable it's that mixing credit cards, retailers, banks and card brands is unpredictable and a lot more complex than anyone wants to believe. With that in mind, StorefrontBacktalk has been asking retailers, lawyers and other experts (and gadflies) for their favorite credit card security issue brain teasers. How many can you figure out?
When North Face—a unit of the $7.2 billion VF Corp. and a major manufacturer of athletic gear and clothing—officials started looking at the tidal wave of consumer-generated Web videos being created, they saw consumer passion. It's the same kind of passion that exists in sports enthusiasts, which is who the retailer needs to reach.
One of the most annoying parts of many a casual restaurant outing is at the end, when you just want to say "Check, please" and all wait staff seems to sense this and decide instead to join the Waitress Relocation Program. Microsoft has created a device that permanently sits on the table.
The National Retail Federation's Shop.org is lobbying the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to not flag consumers when their shopping behaviors are being tracked online, arguing that it would merely serve to frustrate those consumers.
In case there are two or three of you who are still skeptical about whether Web video will have an impact, consider these new figures. In February, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos, which represents a 3 percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66 percent gain versus February 2007, according to ComScore.
GuestView Columnist David Taylor this week questioned why PCI doesn't protect non-payment card information, such as Social Security numbers. Any security consultant will tell you that it's important to have a data classification scheme. Although it makes a nice spreadsheet, we have seen only a few leading-edge merchants and banks that actually attempt to enforce it and use it to drive access controls. Why? Taylor has concluded that it's for a single strategic reason: "Data classification is boring."
The PCI Security Standards Council on April 15 officially rolled out version 1.1 of the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). The specifics of the standard were spelled out last November and this is just the expected formal unveiling.
A DVD rental kiosk outfit has rolled out a kiosk that keeps track of orders and awards free videos for frequent shoppers. The idea of a kiosk that has a long-term memory and an active CRM component is a wonderful next step (OK, a baby step) for intelligent kiosks.
GuestView Columnist Joel Weise—the chief technologist for Sun Microsystems GSS Security Program Office—argues that although there are many qualified security assessors (QSAs), "a few who simply do not have the background and expertise in systems security manage to distort the original intent of PCI."
Blockbuster is trying to acquire Circuit City--a chain that is reporting twice its annual revenue--by offering a 50 percent per-share premium, Blockbuster announced early on April 14.
As of June 17, anyone in Australia buying from eBay online will be told: "PayPal" or "Forget It, Pal." With the exception of in-person pickups and cash-on-delivery, plus a handful of large-ticket items, sellers will be required to offer eBay-owned PayPal as a payment method by May 21, in anticipation of the June 17 ban on anything else.
Unencrypted customer credit card information dating back to 2001 was among the customer payment data stolen from as many as 56,000 customers of Advance Auto Parts, according to one company official, who added that the chain is not PCI compliant.
A group of 109 McDonald's restaurants in the Salt Lake City region are doing a mobile commerce trial, with participating consumers getting free iced coffee. Although those 109 stores are barely one coffee bean's worth, given the $22.8 billion chain's 31,377-store network, the trial is interesting both for its capabilities and for how much data-control McDonald's was willing to give up.
When Best Buy removed annual fees from its bonus card, the company yielded about 10 times the number of shoppers opting to sign up for its rewards program.
The European Commission is cracking down on search engine data-retention, with a new proposed rule that search engines should delete personal data about their customers within six months.
E-Commerce is growing sharply—much more rapidly than in-store sales. It grew some 21 percent, to $175 billion last year, crediting E-Commerce with six percent of all retail sales, according to new figures from Forrester Research.
With reports out this week that Boeing's much-celebrated upcoming aircraft—the 787 Dreamliner—would be again delayed because of technology problems, some wondered if the delays involved 
ISPs have been quietly expanding their use of deep-packet inspection. They are capturing everything a user does—to the point where "at least 100,000 U.S. customers are tracked this way, and service providers have been testing it with as many as 10 percent of U.S. customers, according to tech companies involved in the data collection."
The Web world defies prediction—or does it? Conventional wisdom would have the new up-and-coming retailers faring better online, while the old-style bigbox merchants lag behind. And yet, Starbucks has had far more online troubles than it should have while Sears is soaring online.
Focusing on recent improvements in refrigeration technology, the 115-store Piggly Wiggly is pledging to radically revamp its store. The grocery chain is shaking up product positioning issues—all frozen foods are kept together, for example—that have been considered sacrosanct for decades.
Home Depot CIO/EVP Bob DeRodes has resigned and will leave the $77 billion home improvement chain "at the end of the year," according to a statement Home Depot issued Thursday. DeRodes will continue to run IT until he leaves, the statement said, as the chain starts a search for his replacement.
With the background of repeated recent payment data breaches coupled with wireless security concerns, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last issued a trademark for a cellphone payment that leverages current retail equipment, an instantly encrypted validation code and completely sidesteps wireless communications. Plus, it avoids the retailer having to store the credit card number at all.
Guest Columnist David Taylor is baffled by how often security safeguards are purchased, installed and then not meaningfully used. It's not uncommon for merchants to turn on security controls shortly before an audit, and turn them off afterward.
A series of restaurant chains—including Subway, Tully's and Brinker (Chili's, Macaroni Grill, On The Border, etc.)—have been experimenting with a way to use regular credit and debit cards as loyalty cards.
Amazon.com on Wednesday rolled out a new service called TextBuyIt, which allows consumers to comparison shop online working solely with fast text messages. But the move may not sit well with other retailers, who could see this making it easier to find better deals elsewhere, especially in bookstores.
There is this fairy tale belief that legal justice in civil lawsuits punishes those who act poorly, while protecting and vindicating those who consistently do the right thing. Nowhere is this myth more wrong—indeed, polar opposite wrong—than when dealing with security breach issues of U.S. retailers.
TJX will pay as much as $24 million to cover databreach losses suffered by MasterCard banks, assuming 90 percent of the banks agree to the settlement offer, TJX and MasterCard announced on Wednesday. TJX last year announced the world's worst payment data breach, which impacted some 100 million cards.
Although the coupon redemption rate has been steadily declining for at least 10 years, a new vendor survey suggests the recession may turn that around. Of the 1,529 U.S. consumers who responded, 67 percent said they are much more likely, or somewhat more likely, to use coupons during a recession, according to the survey performed by ICOM Information & Communications.
Bankrupt Pay By Touch—officially using the name Solidus Networks—has sold off two key units for a total of $4.8 million. Phoenix Check Cashing dropped $4.2 million to pick up Pay By Touch's check-cashing division, known as BioPay Paycheck Secure
Pushing a convenience/ease-of-use argument, payment processors have spent much of the last two years trying to get consumers to use different payment methods. But 2008 has thus far not been friendly to them. This week brings the news that American Express is halting its ExpressPay keyfob, some six years after the payment giant started offering it.
In the multi-year databreach at TJX—the worst in credit card history—the retail chain "created an unnecessary risk to personal information by storing it on, and transmitting it between and within, in-store and corporate networks in clear text," according to a complaint issued Thursday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
The security exec then asked an annoyingly thought-provoking question: What do you think would happen if retailer were given perfect encryption? He painted a picture of retailers who would use their perfectly-protected data and would confidently let it ride atop the public Internet. At that point, paying for the private security tunnels of a Visa or MasterCard would no longer be essential.
