Target's Not-So-Smart Cards

摘要

Talk about a smart bomb. Target's new credit card could have been the brainiest in the country. But Target executives never answered a fundamental question: Who needs a smart card anyway? Even after the charge card's debut, "I was in meetings when Target was saying, 'What's the business case?'" says Jonathan Adams, then vice president for product development at Catuity, the lead software company for the project. "Target is one of the most wired retailers around, so anything it wanted to do at point of sale it could do without a smart card." Last March — less than a year after the program was fully up and running — Target announced that its smart card had gotten a failing grade. That's after the retailer spent two years and an estimated $40 million on its own education. And retrofitted 37,000 cash registers to handle 9 million new cards. And installed coupon kiosks at 1,191 stores. And even designed a computer system to handle it all. Yet, faced with the cost of reissuing millions of expiring cards at about $3 apiece, Target said the cards' smart func- tions had "experienced limited use" and the retailer would return to traditional magnetic-strip cards that cost less than a dollar each.