Evan Schuman

In the roughly three weeks since $16 billion retail chain TJX announced it had suffered a major data breach, there has been no shortage of people eager to jump on the “beat up the security victim” bandwagon. Of course, TJX seems to have gone out of its way to invite abuse, whether by sitting on […]

The Massachusetts Attorney General is heading up a group of more than 30 states trying to force answers to how the massive TJX Companies data breach happened. “The scope of this is very broad,” Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said in an interview Feb. 7, a few hours after her office announced the multi-state probe […]

On Feb. 5, the Rhode Island attorney generals office confirmed that it is launching a formal investigation of TJXs data breach, including what caused it, why it wasnt detected more quickly and why the announcement of it was delayed. The investigation—technically, a Civil Investigative Demand on the authority of both Rhode Islands Deceptive Trade Practices […]

When Overstock.com reported a weak earnings fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 5 (revenue down 6 percent, gross profits down 16 percent, a $97 million loss for the year), top management pointed the finger squarely at IT. Its unusual for a company to blame a loss on technology management, but Overstock has done it before. “We […]

Some of the nations top retailers—including Rite Aid, Harry & David, Ikea, KB Toys, Disney, Regal Cinemas and AMC Theaters—are named as defendants in lawsuits stemming from inconsistent point-of-sale deployment. The class-action lawsuits accuse about 50 retail chains of violating a provision of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act that makes it illegal for […]

An innovative RFID trial in Tokyo is using RFID-tagged lipstick to record when various products are sampled and to give store clerks a full customer history of products purchased and tried. The trial—involving retail chain Mitsukoshi, cosmetics company Shiseido and RFID vendor Fujitsu—also offers consumers a “virtual real-time makeup” session featuring a camera-equipped kiosk, display […]

When TJX Companies—the $16 billion global retail chain that owns T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, among many other brands—disclosed on Jan. 17 that it had “suffered an unauthorized intrusion” into its computer systems in December, it seemed to be forthcoming. After all, the chain issued what appeared to be a detailed statement about the incident. Detailed […]

While walking the aisles and hitting the parties at the National Retail Federation annual show in New York this week, I did what I normally do, which is to beg CIOs to tell their thoughts and observations. I tried to hit as many of the most important topics as possible before the CIOs extracted themselves […]

NEW YORK—The retail technology world is in transition, and nowhere is that as clear as at the industrys largest gathering, the National Retail Federations tradeshow and conference here. There are primarily two transitions taking place. The first is an in-store transition, from a world where technology was virtually all behind the scenes as far as […]

Mercado Software is set to introduce software that will—without human intervention—add and remove products based on inventory and item profit margins. The company plans to launch the new software package, called Mercado 4, the week of Jan. 15. While various vendors have offered integration between Web analytics and e-commerce platforms, Mercados new offering is significant […]

The best evidence of the great online-offline divide can be traced to the earliest days of the Web. As the Web was just creeping into prominence, if you had asked any hotshot market observer who would likely run the biggest online bookstore in the new medium, the answer would have been Barnes & Noble or […]

Few have argued that multichannel marketing isnt attractive and most probably essential, and fewer still have questioned the maddening inefficiency of such a system. An upcoming report from the Retail Systems Alert Group predicts that those statements are about to collide as multichannel sales start to become quite significant. “Until now, consumers who shopped across […]