Forget Black Friday and Boxing Day: In the world of POS, the Friday before Christmas is the busiest day of the year

Oh, yes. The Friday before Christmas. That was yesterday.

If you’re in the point-of-sale business, as Moneris Solutions is, the busiest day of the year for transactions is usually going to be the Friday before Christmas – not Black Friday or Boxing Day. The exception might be when Christmas falls on a Saturday and the Friday before Christmas is Christmas Eve, Dec. 24. In that case, the Friday is falling too close to Christmas to be the busiest day of the year for point-of-sale vendors.  While you get last-minute shoppers Christmas Eve, many stores, at least the ones not owned-and-operated by proprietors named Ebenezer, are thinking about closing by mid-afternoon or shortly after Christmas Eve.

The reason the Friday before Christmas is the biggest bonanza of the year for debit and credit processors, is the huge volume of sales, not so much in high-end items such as big screen TV’s, which dominate Black Friday and Boxing Day sales, but rather smaller items such as groceries and liquor, that rack up record numbers for the year.

I worked briefly for Moneris back in 2005 and 2006 and was there for the Friday before Christmas in December 2005, which that year fell on Dec. 23, which while obviously not as late as Christmas Eve the following day, is still pretty late in the festive game for retailers.

In the Maritimes, Moneris Solutions is located in the old red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte St. in Sackville, New Brunswick.  I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick building, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, working in a business that is very much built on proprietary data where you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk,” took some getting used to. Documents had to be turned face down when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift.  Perhaps something like working on Area 51 or at Groom Lake, Nevada, I remember speculating to myself at the time.

My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hot dog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly.

Things like proximity or prox contactless cards with RFID (radio frequency identification) embedded chips, copper antenna coil, and capacitor, with each chip-card storing a unique binary number, were just arriving on the Canadian retail scene, while tokenization, which dated back to 1976 in the payment card industry (PCI), was also starting to make a real mark by 2005.

Tokenization is the concept of using a non-decryptable piece of data to represent, by reference, sensitive or secret data. In the payment card industry context, tokens are used to reference cardholder data that is managed in a tokenization system, application or off-site secure facility.

To protect data over its full life cycle, tokenization is often combined with end-to-end encryption to secure data in transit to the tokenization system or service, with a token replacing the original data on return. For example, to avoid the risks of malware stealing data from low-trust systems such as point of sale (POS) systems, as in the Target breach of 2013, cardholder data encryption must take place prior to card data entering the POS and not after. Encryption takes place within the confines of a security hardened and validated card reading device and data remains encrypted until received by the processing host, an approach pioneered by Heartland Payment Systems as a means to secure payment data from advanced threats, now widely adopted by industry payment processing companies and technology companies. The PCI Council has also specified end-to-end encryption (certified point-to-point encryption—P2PE) for various service implementations in various PCI Council Point-to-point encryption documents. 

Tokenization and “classic” encryption effectively protect data if implemented properly, and an ideal security solution will use both. While similar in certain regards, tokenization and classic encryption differ in a few key aspects. Both are cryptographic data security methods and they essentially have the same function, however they do so with differing processes and have different effects on the data they are protecting. 

Tokenization is a non-mathematical approach that replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive substitutes without altering the type or length of data. This is an important distinction from encryption because changes in data length and type can render information unreadable in intermediate systems such as databases. Tokenized data is secure yet it can still be processed by legacy systems which makes tokenization more flexible than classic encryption.

Another difference is that tokens require significantly less computational resources to process. With tokenization, specific data is kept fully or partially visible for processing and analytics while sensitive information is kept hidden. This allows tokenized data to be processed more quickly and reduces the strain on system resources. This can be a key advantage in systems that rely on high performance.

My old boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, and who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering roll out of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank.

Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

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Butch Cassidy and the end of an era in the Wild West, also known as the Old West

Today marks the 149th anniversary of the birth of Butch Cassidy, the last of the legendary Wild West or Old West bank and train robbers, in Beaver in what was then the Utah Territory. Utah was admitted to statehood on Jan. 4, 1896. Beaver is 210 miles southwest of Salt Lake City and 220 miles northeast of Las Vegas, situating it about halfway between the two cities.

The first settlers came to Beaver from Parowan, about 35 miles to the southwest, in April 1856, a decade before Cassidy’s birth as Robert Leroy Parker, a son of Mormon parents who had answered Brigham Young’s call for young couples to help build communities of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adherents.

Parker was the first of 13 children born to Max and Annie Parker.

On June 24, 1889, Parker, who had taken to using the alias George Cassidy, committed his first big-league crime, robbing a bank in Telluride, Colorado, of more than $20,000. It was while laying low afterwards, while he worked in a Rock Springs, Wyoming, butcher shop, that he earned the nickname  “Butch” Cassidy, which would become one of the most famous criminal aliases in American history.

In 1894, Cassidy was arrested for horse theft in Wyoming. He served two years in the Wyoming Territorial Prison at Laramie. Upon his release, he quickly returned to a life of crime, putting together a gang of outlaws that became known as the Wild Bunch.

Cassidy’s most famous partner was Harry Longbaugh, better known as the “Sundance Kid.” Longbaugh’s nickname came in 1888 after his release from jail in the town of Sundance, the county seat for Crook County in the then Wyoming Territory, about 270 miles north of Cheyenne, where he had served time for horse theft. Wyoming was admitted to statehood immediately preceding Utah on July 10, 1890.

Other members of the Wild Bunch included Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry; Ben “The Tall Texan” Kilpatrick; Harry Tracy, Deaf Charley Hanks and Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum.

The Wild Bunch specialized in holding up railroad express cars, and the gang was sometimes called the Train Robbers’ Syndicate.

The characters of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were, of course, forever immortalized in the 1969 film bearing their names, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid. The film won three Academy Awards in 1970.

As the 19th century came to a close, the Wild West was no longer quite so wild. In fact, Larry  Schweikart, a professor of American history at the University of Dayton, and Lynne Pierson Doti, the David and Sandra Stone Professor of Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California, argue in their 1991 book, Banking in the American West from the Gold Rush to Deregulation, argue that at least in terms of bank robberies, most of what we believe to be true is really myth and there were in a 40-year period in the late 19th century, spread across 15 states and territories, including every state or territory west of the Missouri/Minnesota/Texas line, specifically, Arizona, California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, maybe a dozen bank robberies including two major ones pulled by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In any event, the Old West was becoming both more populous and efficient in terms of law enforcement. The frontier was closing.

Tired of his robberies, railroad executives hired detectives to catch Cassidy and began placing mounted guards in railcars to pursue the Wild Bunch.

In 1901, Cassidy fled the United States for Argentina accompanied by his lover, Etta Place, and the Sundance Kid. The trio homesteaded a ranch at Cholila, though Place returned to the United States after several years. In 1904, Cassidy and Sundance learned that detectives had tracked them to South America. They abandoned the Cholila ranch and resumed a life of robbery in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.

While there is no conclusive evidence to prove it, Bolivian troops reportedly killed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the village of San Vicente in 1908.

The families of both men insist, however, that the men survived and returned to live into old age in the United States.

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International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA): Three-day ‘Wide World of Sales Conference’ kicks off Jan. 14 at Bally’s & Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino

Scanning the conference program for the three-day International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA) “Wide World of Sales Conference” running from Jan. 14-16 at Bally’s & Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, billed by its promoters as the “only sales and marketing conference for end-of-life professionals,” one is quickly brought to the realization that the funeral business is first and foremost just that; a business. And secondly, its conference format and focus doesn’t look so very different than the dozens of such events I used to attend for lawyers, judges, law students and law professors back when I was chief writer for Ontario Lawyers Weekly (now The Lawyers Weekly) in Toronto.

The ICCFA is chalk full of trade ideas on how to better utilize “death business management software” and the conference features motivational speakers, such as Anthony Iannarino, CEO of B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy in Columbus, Ohio, and Gary O’Sullivan, of The Gary O’Sullivan Company in Winter Garden, Florida, who will be holding a 90-minute “fireside chat” from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday for arriving conference attendees. Apparently the members of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association involved in sales very much like what O’Sullivan has to say because he was recognized as their speaker of the decade in 2000 – and then again, for an unprecedented second time, in 2010.

While there is nothing surprising about any of this, I can’t help recalling the late Jessica Mitford’s 1963 landmark investigative journalism in her best-selling book, The American Way of Death, an expose of abuses in the early 1960s funeral home industry in the United States, which was still being read by aspiring journalists 20 years later when I was in journalism school. Feeling that death had become much too sentimentalized, highly commercialized, and, above all, excessively expensive, Mitford documents the ways in which, she argued, funeral directors took advantage of the shock and grief of friends and relatives of loved ones to convince them to pay far more than necessary for the funeral and other services. Mitford died at the age of 78 in July 1996, but shortly before her death she had completed The American Way of Death Revisited, which was published posthumously in 1998. Mitford, in keeping with her wishes, was cremated in an inexpensive funeral by Pacific Interment Service in San Francisco at a total cost reportedly of $533.31.

The Sterling, Virginia-based International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association is the only international trade association representing all segments of the cemetery, funeral service, cremation and memorialization industry.

“Founded in 1887 as the Association of American Cemetery Superintendents,” according to the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association’s website, “the organization was created by a group of 18 cemeterians whose goal was to improve the appearance and operations of their properties. Throughout its first century of operation, the association grew in size and mission and underwent several name changes, but it remained a national cemetery-only organization. In 1996, the association became the International Cemetery and Funeral Association, expanding its membership to include funeral homes and other related businesses and extending its reach beyond U.S. borders. In 2007, ‘Cremation’ was added to the name to more accurately reflect the operations and goals of its membership.”

Today, the ICCFA is composed of more than 7,500 cemeteries, funeral homes, crematories, memorial designers and related businesses worldwide.

One of the hot topics trending in the funeral industry for 2015, experts predict, will be death DNA. CD Funeral News ConnectingDirectors.com , a Zanesville, Ohio-based online publication for funeral professionals, published by Ryan Thogmartin, who also owns DISRUPT Media, asked in a Dec. 21 post, “Consumers are having discussions daily about DNA, how is your funeral home addressing this emerging subject? The piece by Terri Sullivan, an Emmy Award winning anchor-reporter at ABC 6/Fox 28 in Columbus, Ohio, opened with “a” local funeral home is helping central Ohio families cope with the loss of a loved one by saving a bit of the past for the future. In some cases it could be lifesaving. It’s called a DNA memorial.

“Schoedinger Funeral And Cremation Service has offered it for about a month. A swab is used to collect cells from inside the mouth, which, along with a snippet of hair, is sent off to a lab for processing.

“I think one of the big reasons people are starting to do this is the technology continues to evolve every year on what we can do with genes and dna genetics and so forth,” said Michael Schoedinger. “And what we’re learning is the cremation rate is approaching 50 per cent. Once a person’s been cremated, we can’t reverse the process and collect their DNA. It’s destroyed forever … Schoedinger said the reasons people opt for the service vary. Some use to it determine their risk of disease or certain medical conditions, others want to know more about their family history.

“Schoedinger says in many ways it’s a gift from the past to future generations.” You can read the complete article here at: http://connectingdirectors.com/articles/45459-millions-of-consumers-are-having-this-conversation-is-your-firm-taking-part

“The relevance of DNA to funeral consumers (because we are destroying the DNA of deceased people when we cremate) will continue to emerge as a subject of importance,” Jeff Harbeson of the Roanoke, Virginia area wrote Jan. 1 in a post in The Funeral Commander, his widely followed industry blog. “Will 2015 be the first year a family will sue a funeral home for destroying their loved ones genetic record without telling them?” Harbeson asks. You can read the complete post here at: http://thefuneralcommander.com/2015/01/01/funeral-industry-2014-in-the-rear-view-mirror-2015-in-the-windshield/

Harbeson, who retired from the U.S. military as a captain, got his start in the funeral industry in January 2004 with as a sales consultant with Batesville Casket Company of Batesville, Indiana. He founded The Harbeson Group in January 2010 and was the co-founder of Family Choice Funerals & Cremations in November 2009.

And in a Canadian connection to the death retrieval DNA trend, Harbeson, although not a scientist, was named president last July of CG Labs Inc. in Thunder Bay in northwestern Ontario, founded by its chief scientist, Ryan Lehto, who graduated from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay with a BSc. and in biology and MSc. in molecular biology with a specialization in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) research. Lehto used to work for the university. Harbeson, also a company director, is on board for his specialized marketing experience. As well as the funeral industry, CG Labs, which is based in the McKellar LifeCentre on South Archibald Street, offers expert opinion and services in areas including mass disaster identification; film and television projects; cold case unsolved mysteries (CG Labs once purchased some of Al Capone’s hair at an auction and were able to extract the DNA. It now hangs on the wall, a framed exhibit, so to speak); archaeological sites; and aboriginal land claims.

Last September, CG Labs Inc. began marketing their Secure My DNA brand “to consumers in non-post death situations.” You can watch a 2m6sec YouTube clip called SecureMyDNA here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GCj6Y82VnY

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