Wal-Mart is certainly a company of few words. But when the world’s largest retailer (it’s expecting to hit $400 billion in annual sales later this year or early next year) wants to make a technology endorsement, a few words are all that’s necessary.

Such is the case with the announcement Monday (July 21) that Wal-Mart is standardizing on an Oracle business intelligence package—Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) to be precise. Read more.

In an eerie snapshot of where some top marketers want to take the next generation of search engines, a Japanese government-backed research project is working on a search that is based on what a user does, not a keyword a user types in.

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer’s activities “based on data captured by mobile device camera.” Read more.

Staples’ Canadian operation has been quietly testing 2-way live video kiosks at 34 locations, but these kiosks do more than talk with customers: They remotely control hardware, including scanners and payment authorization devices.

The trial, which one Staples Business Depot manager described as “one of the largest pilots that we’ve ever done,” involves one video kiosk—with a high-resolution Web camera, microphone, scanner and a touch-screen—at each store that is networked to 10 kiosks at a Toronto office with customer service reps. Read more.

Despite an almost universal embrace of the idea of merged channel, most retailers aren’t getting any closer to making it a reality, with overly restrictive inventory reserve policies, inconsistent data and political resistance getting most of the blame, according to a new Forrester Research report.

“How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory” for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. “You never know where demand is going to crystallize.” He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by “reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel.” Read more.

A handful of Stop & Shop stores have been using in-store location tracking–coupled with basket content–to narrowly target ads to customers using handheld shopping devices, the chain confirmed in a statement issued Thursday (July 17). Some 92 of the chain’s 360 stores are participating in the trial.

“If a customer is walking down the health and beauty aisle, it can trigger an offer for a new brand of shampoo,” said Michele Deziel, the senior VP of marketing at Modiv Media, which is working with Stop & Shop on the trial, along with Microsoft.

Two recent developments—one involving a New York federal judge and the other involving a group of U.S. senators—are signaling serious difficulties for E-Commerce efforts over the next two years.

The assumption of some anonymity on E-Commerce sites can be critical. Let’s look at a scenario for Amazon.com. One of its most critical value-adds is customer comments—both good and bad—about its products. What if a consumer—employed in the consumer appliance world—purchased a toaster that was absolutely horrible? Read more.

Will consumers ever deploy counter-top barcode scanners and a Web site to have groceries delivered to them automatically? A company called Ikan.net is hoping they will.

The system combines a Web-connected barcode scanner, which scans every product before it’s thrown out or recycled, and then adds it to a shopping list. The list then is shared with either a grocery retailer directly or a grocery delivery service like Peapod, which does the delivery of the empty items. This nicely done New York Times story shows the efforts of its writer to use the system.

J.C. Penney customers are twice as likely to say they are highly satisfied with their in-store shopping experience if they are working with store employees who are accessing the company’s Web site while standing next to them. That according to an Internet Retailer story quoting Kevin Gebhardt, the chain’s director of multi-channel coordination and implementation.

It’s been almost two years since the chain connected all 35,000 of its point-of-sale systems to the Web, giving associates in its nearly 1,100 stores access to the retailer’s e-commerce site, JCP.com, the story said. “J.C. Penney also has tested placing Web-enabled kiosks in stores so that customers can access JCP.com on their own, but decided against deploying them,” Gebhardt said. He added that “the retailer is focusing on helping employees provide better service rather than on self-service technologies, with the exception of kiosks that customers use for accessing online gift registries.”

When Oracle finally introduced its Retail 13 integrated suite this week, after three years of acquisition and integration, the teams working for the world’s largest enterprise software vendor might have breathed a sigh of relief. They might have hoped that the hardest part was behind them.

But creating a vast integrated suite is not the hard part. Convincing retail IT execs, worried about politics, perception and pragmatism, to turn over their most valuable data to one license-fee-hungry vendor? That’s where the real fun starts. Read more.

After three years of acquisition and integration, Tuesday (June 17) saw the official launch of Oracle’s Retail Release 13, consisting of some 33 retail applications, only four of which were new. The rollout was billed by Oracle as the be-all and end-all of end-to-end integrated retail application suites, but some analysts said the integration was lacking.

“Given that they waited so long, I would have expected better connectivity with some of the supply chain assets that they’ve acquired over the years and not have to wait until who knows when for some of that connectivity,” said AMR Research Director Mike Griswold. Read more.

Are European retailers going to have any better luck than American retailers with consumer-facing biometric payments? The 750-store Albert Heijn supermarket chain, the largest such chain in the Netherlands, is about to find out.

While various European chains (such as Germany’s Wagener Department Stores) have enjoyed modest success with biometrics, the Albert Heijn chain’s June 17 statement said it would commit to the trial for six months.

A pair of unrelated reports out this week are challenging several fundamental IT security assumptions, including that data breach laws will reduce consumer losses and that insiders account for more thefts than external evil-doers.

A Verizon Business security report analyzed more than 500 data breach incidents over four years and found that 73 percent started from the outside and only 18 percent were inside jobs. Read more.

E-Commerce leader Amazon.com completely crashed for almost three hours on Friday afternoon (June 6), with one Web site performance tracking firm attributing the crash to excessive site complexity.

“One thing that is true about Amazon’s site is that it is very complex, utilizing numerous backend database, proxy servers, distributed application and Web servers, lots of dynamic images, etc.,” said Shawn White, director of external operations at Web site performance tracking firm Keynote. “Even accessing the homepage involves complex multi-step interactions between the Web browser and a number of backend systems within Amazon.” Read more.

Shoppers at Gap.com will now be able to use a single shopping cart and consolidate shipping at any of the chain’s four brands, the Gap announced on Tuesday (May 27).

But the change for The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and PiperLime is delicate, as the company still wants those brands to maintain their distinct personalities. Those conflicting goals give the new site a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde feel, as though a long-time favorite clothing store suddenly stopped remembering to take its medication. Read more.

About 36 percent of all E-Commerce shoppers who abandon their shopping cart did so because the purchase total was a lot more than they had expected. That’s one takeaway from an April PayPal survey of U.S. e-tail consumers.

The survey offered few surprises, but the quantification of the stated reasons was intriguing. The top cause was the expected “shipping charges were too high” (43 percent). The remaining cart surrender reasons were the consumer wanted to do more comparison shopping (27 percent), the prospect “could not contact customer support to answer questions” (16 percent) and some 14 percent said they gave up because they had forgotten their username and/or password.

MasterCard Canada this summer will start a 4-month NFC-phone trial, with the backing of some of Canada’s largest retailers, including Loblaw, Petro Canada, Tim Hortons’, Pioneer Petroleum, Rabba Foods, a major NHL arena and McDonalds.

One unusual aspect of the trial is that it will eventually support more than one payment card on each phone, said MasterCard Canada’s Nagesh Devata.

A handful of grocery chains—including PriceChopper and Wegmans—have started using CRM data to alert customers to product recalls. It’s an encouraging move to convince consumers that loyalty cards can be used to help them beyond taking 10 cents off a gallon of milk.

The program at PriceChopper—a 116-store grocery chain in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont–is especially interesting as it uses an automatic phone-calling system to instantly and simultaneously reach out to impacted customers. Last month, the system was used to reach out to some 12,000 customers about a recall of Samuel Adams beer due to glass fragments, according to this intriguing report in the Daily Gazette, a daily newspaper from Schenectady, N.Y..

Nordstrom on Tuesday (May 20) said they would support buy-online-pick-up-in-store for the first time. This e-commerce cross-channel classic has been popular for several years, but Nordstrom–with its stronger than average commitment to customer service–has resisted until now.

The chain is initially testing it with Women’s apparel, Men’s apparel, Women’s Shoes and Cosmetics, with Nordstrom saying that it “plans to offer this service for all merchandise categories by September.” It will be interesting to see how the chain’s legendary customer service handles it. The expectations of a Nordstrom’s customer will be much higher than the customers for most chains that have tried buy-online-pick-up-in-store. Read more.

Microsoft’s announcement this week that it would offer rebates for purchases made through its search engine is shaking the E-Commerce world. But the very lengthy list of gotchas—including making consumers wait potentially 11 weeks after purchases before seeing the rebate checks—is raising questions about whether this approach will work.

The idea of offering consumers financial bribes if they use a particular search engine has been tried before, without success. But Microsoft’s entry into this field—the latest in a series of Redmond gambits to try and breathe life into its search engine—is different from earlier efforts. Read more.

Using virtual reality, $18 billion consumer goods giant Kimberly-Clark is creating virtual depictions of stores, shelves, products and displays—even sounds and smells people encounter while shopping—to enhance traditional means of research, according to this story in CPG Matters.

“With virtual reality, K-C and its strategic retail partners have a stealth, risk-averse way to test new products, packages, display positions, assortments and point-of-purchase materials without taxing muscles or bearing the cost of physical goods movement,” the story said. “Depictions of retail interiors on the full wall-size screen at its Innovation Design Studio in Greenville, Wis. (opened in May 2007), are realistic and reflective of real-world shopping.” An interesting discussion about this effort–along with skeptical thoughts about some of the sales increase claims–is in the comments area of this RetailWire piece.

A pair of British shopping centers is experimenting with a creative way to leverage consumer cellphones. The consumers are being surreptitiously tracked by the signals emitted by all mobile devices and a database notes when consumers “enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there and what route they take as they walked around,” according to a report in The London Times.

A spokesperson for the vendor behind the trials–Path Intelligence, of Portsmouth–said its equipment was just a tool for market research. “There’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokesperson said. “There’s nothing personal in the data.” But their system does apparently grab a consumer’s phone’s unique IMEI number, which is found on all GSM and UMTS mobile phones. The carrier would theoretically have the data to match it to personally identifiable data.

Facing a much tighter financial picture (the latest quarterly report saw comparable net income almost cut in half), Sears has turned to online operations as its best hope for better margins. Sears on May 15 announced “a large-scale expansion of its online store” with a “nearly quadrupling (of) the number of products available on sears.com.”

Sears is in a fascinating online position. On the one hand, the $50 billion 3,800-store-chain says its online numbers are soaring, with the number of unique visitors in February 2008 reportedly rising 20 percent in that month. But Sears.com has also run into quite a few speedbumps. Read more.

Guess this is what the cliché-afflicted would call a “sign of the times.” Macys is killing the Bloomingdale’s catalog while Amazon.com is selling copies of Bloomingdale’s 1886 catalog for $12. (Can you imagine the number of out-of-stocks in that thing?)

Current Bloomie’s owner Macys is killing the classic catalog “by early 2009″ to focus more on its Web site and “reduce redundancies” (corporatespeak for pinkslip panic). A Macys statement even came up with a politically correct reason to zap the catalog: “Eliminating the paper catalog is also consistent with our sustainability and environmental policies of communicating more with customers electronically and less in paper.”

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.

To state the obvious: It’s getting consumers to use them. I say it’s obvious, but one wouldn’t guess that based on what the vendors were saying this week. Read more.

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. The chain limits the offer to the Boston area through area code and other data.

But it just so happens that there’s a huge convention in San Jose that day of the Society Of People Who Live In Boston. Your San Jose locations get flooded with people asking for their free gift, leading to a lot of baffled employees and angry customers. This observation comes courtesy of a colleague who has far too much time on his hands to think up such things.

British retailers are seeing a resurgence in cash purchases, mostly due to a weak economy and consumers who are “nervous about borrowing or spending on debit cards,” according to a new report from the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

The British retail group used the opportunity to beat up banks and card brands for overly high interchange fees. (Then again, retail lobbying groups need no special occasion to make such points, as they often volunteer them when asked about the weather.) But the question remains whether the consumer reactions that are pushing cash usage in the U.K. are likely to be replicated in other parts of the world. Read more.

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 Web site.

The new feature—dubbed Virtual Waiter and introduced by the fast-food chain on April 24—is based on “technology that gathers data from millions of online orders and suggests menu items that best match customers’ orders.” But a demo showed that the technology was much more sophisticated than that suggested. Read more.

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, according to this BusinessWeek story.

After checkout, customers would have the option of removing the labels containing the tags, Wal-Mart told the state legislators. “If a manufacturer installed the tag inside a container, workers would be able to deactivate it before a customer leaves the store,” the story said.

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.

But as we’ve noted before, Starbucks has always had an unusually weak Web presence, especially for a chain that for years dominated social networking buzz among younger consumers long before MySpace, Facebook or YouTube were factors. Is this the price that must be paid for years of Web neglect? Could an enthusiastic Web site have helped in-store sales?

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.

Those North Face executives are far from alone. As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers have been watching—mesmerized—consumers watch more than 10 billion U.S. Web videos in February, they have tried to figure out ways to make it work for them. Read more.

E-Commerce customers have several complaints about online buying, but the top concerns are Web images that don’t match the real thing and sites that make it difficult to easily ask any questions, according to a late March Opinion Research Corp. Web survey of 1,092 consumers.

Linda Shea, the polling firm’s senior vice president and global managing director of customer strategies, said the inability to answer questions was particularly telling, and it was the result of an E-Commerce double-whammy. It reflects a rapidly increasing set of consumer expectations when it comes to E-Commerce sites at the exact same time that retailers are slashing customer service budgets, she said. Read more.

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 seem to sense this and decide instead to join the Waitress Relocation Program.

Microsoft has decided to help (OK, they smelled money in those missing food servers) and created a device that permanently sits on the table. Redmond is backing this hardware that can take payment, print out a receipt and do it all without having to catch anyone’s eye. It allows the tip to be added (minus a deduction for subjecting you to the machine), and it can show various promotions. (OK, so having mandatory TV commercials when you’re dining out is probably not a good thing.) It also has a button to summon a manager if there’s an issue.

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 considering voluntary guidelines for E-Commerce behavioral advertising, the FTC is considering asking sites to display a “pop-up” notification whenever information is collected. Wrote Shop.org: “We all know how frustrating pop-ups can be when you are simply trying to read the latest headlines on a newspaper website. Now transfer that experience to a retail website where customers have come to expect a seamless experience from homepage to checkout. These types of ‘hiccups’ could be devastating.”

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.

The new units from DVDPlay use E-mail addresses in lieu of a loyalty card. “By entering an E-mail address during the rental process, the stand-alone DVD rental machine’s patent-pending software recognizes the number of customer rental transactions and, after every tenth rental, generates a promotional code for a free movie that is automatically sent to the customer’s E-mail account,” said a statement issued by the company.

Wal-Mart is pushing to create online communities for its customers, where Wal-Mart employees can sit on the sidelines, take notes and be influenced, or so suggests the chief marketing officer for online operations at the world’s largest retailer.

“Consider 130 million customers in a community sharing information on products they buy and use,” said Cathy Halligan, in this Marketing Daily story. “We learned you need to listen to these customers and implement the top-requested features.”

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.

McDonald’s is launching iced coffee as part of some new menu options and “part of our objective was to create additional awareness,” especially among the younger consumers who McDonald’s assumes will be receptive to a mobile coupon campaign.” Read more.

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. It was part of their annual State of Retailing Online Report that they do with NRF’s Shop.org.

That E-Commerce figure will hit $204 billion this year (when it’s percent of total retail will climb to seven percent) and will continue to have major gains for the next several years, hitting $335 billion in annual sales by 2012, Forrester said. But one of the report’s authors, Forrester Research Director Carrie Johnson, said that this isn’t necessarily cause for retail celebration, as she projected that many of those increased sales are little more than online cannibalizing in-store sales. Read more.

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, according to this intriguing Chicago Tribune feature, is soaring online.

The number of people who visited Sears.com and Kmart .com at least once in February—an industry metric known as unique visitors—rose 20 percent, to 14.7 million, from the same period last year. That makes Sears’ Web business the second-fastest-growing site among mass merchants in 2007. Sears clearly has some serious challenges, but go tell that to the company’s Web people.

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, according to this Forbes.com story.

A location that gains a reputation as a “flat-screen store,” for example, is identified as one frequented by more people with disposable incomes. Hence, salespeople are trained to pitch complimentary products, like sound systems and attachments. Interesting story….

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.

The BBC News site said this recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. “Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months, while Yahoo does the same after 13 months,” the BBC reported.

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,” said a new report in The Washington Post.

The service providers exploring and testing such services have largely kept quiet–”for fear of customer revolt,” according to one executive involved who was quoted in the Post story. Each company allows users to opt out of the monitoring, though that permission is buried in customer service documents.

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.

Although the merchant behind the program—Chockstone—stresses a variety of security mechanisms, the nature of the program itself seems to fly in the face of PCI guidelines that discourage using credit card numbers for anything other than payment transactions, similar to the unsuccessful attempts to get American businesses to stop using Social Security numbers as defacto employee and customer identification numbers. Read more.

The retail move to embrace 2-D barcodes that began with a Sears trial in December and strong interest from BestBuy, the Gap and Target is inching forward, with a 500-store trial starting Thursday in San Francisco.

The trial, involving CitySearch, Antenna Audio and Scanbuy, is a fairly basic mobile integration effort. “More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows, and people who have Scanbuy software loaded on their phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page,” said a statement from the group.

Saks is seeing how far it can take Web multimedia, by trying to morph its online catalogue with live video and creating a live model runway show.

The test focuses on Saks’ three best-selling departments: Contemporary ready-to-wear, handbags, and shoes, according to this MediaPost story. “Since Saks knows that about 99 percent of its shoppers have broadband access, ‘it’s been great for us,’” said Denise Incandela, president of Saks Direct. “You can have movement, voice-over, music and information, with narrators talking about what’s important in each look.”

When Starbucks used its shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday to roll out several new initiatives, the new coffee makers and blends got much of the attention. But two of the new plans—a revised CRM program and a new Web site—illustrate nicely how well Starbucks understands customer service and how it still hasn’t figured out the Web.

The change to the Starbucks Card Rewards program shows not just an understanding of customer service, but a realization that the best way to make a CRM program successful is to focus on benefits—true benefits—for both the customer and the retailer. Instead of merely tracking purchases and offering small discounts (adjusting the price of a cup of flavored coffee down from ludicrously overpriced to merely absurdly overpriced. Buy one more croissant and tomorrow you can enjoy a cup of Joe that is only insultingly overpriced), Starbucks is getting creative about rewards. Read more.

Next Tuesday, it’s likely Washington state will have a new RFID law on its books, one that will be the first in the nation to make malicious stealing of data via RFID a crime. But the bill is a far cry from what’s the bill’s assemblyman sponsor had envisioned—and what he says he will still fight to get.

The bill had been pushed by Assemblyman Jeff Morris. The final version of the bill—which Morris said he expects Washington Governor Chris Gregoire to sign into law on Tuesday—makes anyone guilty of a Class C felony if they “intentionally scan another person’s identification device remotely, without that person’s prior knowledge and prior consent, for the purpose of fraud, identity theft or for any other illegal purpose.” Read more.

Among the retailers that are referenced as most intelligently embracing merged channels–the true channel-agnostic merchant–is Borders, whether it’s with their new concept stores or their breakup with Amazon.com.

It’s therefore an especially troubling note that they are having financial difficulties, as detailed in this New York Times piece. It’s an age-old business belief that few chains truly buy into and adopt major strategic changes until it’s too late. I hope that Borders turns out to be the exception.

The Hannaford supermarket chain confirmed on Monday a “data intrusion” during payment authorization transmissions that exposed some 4.2 million credit and debit cards and led to 1,800 reported cases of fraud thus far.

During the breach, “no personal information, such as names or addressed, was accessed or obtained” but the breach did expose customer credit and debit card numbers along with their expiration dates, said Hannaford CEO Ronald Hodge. Read more.

About one month into a major near field communication (NFC) trial, officials at fast-food chain Jack In The Box discovered a problem they hadn’t anticipated: cashiers didn’t know how to ring up a sale when the customer presented their cellphone as payment.

“We need to do a little more training,” said Michael Verdesca, the chain’s VP for systems development. Read more.

Hello, blog readers! We’ve been approached by a company that wants to create a 3-D environment for StorefrontBacktalk, complete with avatars for all readers. Before we explored this more seriously, we wanted to ask our readers whether we should proceed. Therefore…

The Metro Group’s RFID trial efforts have been well-known, but this is an interesting International Herald-Tribune story discussing some of the privacy debates within Europe on their efforts.

The piece quotes a Metro person as saying that a recent European Union effort to force the tags to be deactivated at POS as the kiss of death for consumer-facing RFID. “If we have to deactivate at the check-out, then the technology is going to stay within the logistics process - to say where is a box or where is the pallet in the distribution center. It won’t come on consumer items. They’re going to kill the technology with that.”

Wal-Mart has quietly launched its latest blog effort–called Check Out–and the site shows unusually strong un-Wal-Mart-like candor. This move is key in E-Commerce because retail blogs are becoming a powerful tool, lying somewhere inbetween a social network and video sites. The big threat of E-Commerce to established large retail chains is its potential to ignore the power of the brand and equalize all with good designs.

The reality is, though, that brands still matter very much. Those brands come with all of the good and the not-so-good reputations of that retailer. Will Wal-Mart The Usurper’s reputation be tamed with a friendly and candid blog face? Read more.

When the Sharper Image chain of 184 stores announced late in February that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that it would no longer honor its gift certificates, the community quickly rallied around its injured compatriot, like sharks coming to the aid of an injured swordfish.

First up was a gift card exchange site called Leverage. Leverage didn’t offer to make good on the Sharper Image gift cards, but it did offer to make whole any of its own customers who bought Sharper Image gift cards through Leverage’s site. That move will cost Leverage “a few thousand dollars,” said Leverage CEO Mark Edward Roberts. Read more.

Are we looking at a near future where consumers’ purchase profiles will be used by law enforcement to track down fugitives?

The potential is absolutely there, with retailers collecting molecular mountains of shopping history—sometimes more than a decade’s worth—and law enforcement seeking creative ways to find criminals (or people they think are criminals) who are quite determined about not being found. Read more.

Despite recession fears, retail POS purchases increased some 5 percent last year, which is more than twice as much as had been projected, according to a new report from the IHL Group.

There are several reasons for the unexpected spike, chief among them PCI demands hitting smaller retailers and new profit-enhancing techniques that require current POS equipment, sai