As Superstorm Sandy blew its devastating winds through much of the Eastern U.S. starting on Halloween, retailers had to deal with it just like everyone else. But few seemed to have anticipated the more than eight days - and more, in some cases - of outages, along with the gas shortages, closed roads, lack of food and water, plus the dead phone lines, lack of internet broadband access and dead cell towers.

In a case that has potentially significant consequences for NFC and RFID applications, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on so-called "phone home" technologies used by computer rental companies to monitor consumer behavior. When contemplating the use of any technology that provides use, location or other information about a product, retailers should be careful to ensure consumers know - or are at least able to know - exactly what the product is doing once they leave the store.

A victim mentality seems to be sweeping through the retail industry. Every day, good retail organizations make horrible decisions (or, in some cases, do not make a decision) that even they know will have a long-term negative impact on their business.

Is updating your digital signage with a mobile device really such a good idea? That's the question raised by the recent announcement that Swedish retail giant ICA will begin using mobile apps next month for making changes to its in-store signs.

For quite a few years now, retailers have salivated over the idea of mobile phones revealing exactly where shoppers are at all times. Retailers would know which displays customers are standing in front of, for how long and what actions they take right afterward. Unfortunately, even though mobile devices have advanced quite a bit recently, the ability to know location with any precision has been elusive.

A glitch that sat between a Little Caesars franchisee's POS system and its payment processor, Fifth Third, caused one of its pizza shops to process zero payment card transactions for more than eight months. (A second store didn't process transactions for two months.) And then, to the non-delight of that store's customers, the glitch was fixed and they started getting collectively hit with thousands of charges for eight months of pizza purchases.

With a staggering $444bn in annual revenue, Walmart has generally been sluggish and conservative, allowing tech innovations to be toyed with by rivals such as Amazon.com. But in the last few months, Walmart has quietly started acting like quite the aggressive start-up.

Why is it that the same retailers who will replace a finance clerk's desktop like clockwork every four years will let their POS linger for eight, nine, 10 or more years? Why is it that data centers can be consolidated and servers can be virtualized but e-commerce still operates as a separate channel? The answer is simple: politics.

If a retailer really wants to compete with Amazon and the changing realities of today's retail environment, it needs to kill the IT budget, disband the IT Steering Committee and throw away the IT project list. It's time for IT to be moved out from under the CFO's reigns. It's time to let go of the past and start thinking about IT as a business enabler, unleashing its full potential to the organization.

Retailers wrestling with how far they can legally go with tracking shoppers' movements within their stores and in neighborhoods near their stores have been given an unexpected green light from a federal appeals court.