Evan Schuman

With concern growing over major retail data breaches, pressure is increasing for retailers to become compliant with the retail industrys security standards, formally called the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Several states are trying to make such compliance legally required. But behind PCI is an alarming patchwork of contradictory enforcement, auditors selling the same […]

After months of investigation, the state of Connecticut sued Best Buy on May 24 and accused the chain of tricking customers with two identical-looking Web sites in its stores, with the only difference being that one had higher prices. “Best Buy treated its customers like suckers, not patrons to be prized,” said Connecticut Attorney General […]

The promise of personalization—where stores in one neighborhood would have entirely different merchandise than one in a nearby neighborhood with a different customer mix—is nothing new. Retailers have been adding technology to their stores for years to test it out, in many different ways. But almost all of those efforts were isolated and piecemeal. They […]

The $81 billion European retail chain Metro Group is moving ahead with its Asian RFID supplier program, promoting a kick-off program May 23 for 30 partners at the Hong Kong Science & Technology Park. The “Tag It Easy” pilot is officially part of an initiative that Metro is calling Advanced Logistics Asia, or ALA, which […]

Consider this scenario: A customer walks into a favorite retail outlet and grabs a handheld shopping helper from a rack near the entrance. The customer signs the unit out with a loyalty card and the unit accesses shopping lists from what the customer downloaded onto a Web site and uses in-store directional signals to navigate […]

TJX reported May 15 that, in the three months leading up to April 28, it spent $12 million dealing with the data breach the company announced in January. Thats on top of $5 million the company said it spent in the previous three months to deal with the breach. A TJX statement said the money […]

Several E-Commerce sites have tried to make a profit with grocery online, with Priceline probably the most notorious at making a big noise and a big loss. One of the few that seems to be making some serious headway is Peapod, which has the pedigree to do grocery right: It’s owned by Stop & Shop. […]

You could draw quite a few different conclusions from the retail payment security compliance figures released by Visa on May 9, ranging from retailers are taking credit card security more seriously to many of those retailers have all but given up trying. Thats the beauty of statistical analysis. For example, the figures show that, among […]

As a series of lawsuits against some of the nations largest retailers for illegally revealing too much credit card information on printed receipts winds its way through the courts, one federal judge has ruled that some key retail defenses are “absurd” and “unreasonable.” In a decision handed down May 3, U.S. District Judge Gary Allen […]

The issues and the symbolism couldnt have been more the quintessential old versus new battle. In one corner, we have 96-year-old IBM, master of the patent for more decades than most companies have existed. In the other corner, Amazon.com, king of e-commerce and one of the top leaders of the Web. (One could argue that […]