Wednesday, September 9, 2009

What Retailers Expect Out of WIC EBT

One of the key stakeholder groups in EBT is food retailers. Food retailers have been involved in EBT planning since before the first pilot in Reading, when they acceded to the use of debit card technology for disbursing food stamps because the online authorization process relieved them of any liability for misissuance.

Ten years or so ago, retailers were engaged in efforts to define transaction message sets and UPC databases for WIC EBT. That work helped aggregate information from several disparate WIC EBT pilots, and start us down the path of a common framework for WIC EBT, very similar to what we have today for SNAP EBT.

Today the retail community is actively and positively involved in helping shape the business rules for WIC EBT. The Food Marketing Institute, the trade association representing supermarkets and other food industry companies, provides an enormous amount of information on SNAP and WIC EBT on its website. This information, publicly available, helps inform the discussion about EBT.

But the issue remains: What do retailers really expect from WIC EBT? In trying to answer that question (only a retailer can answer it for sure), I go back to a discussion I had more than 15 years ago with Jim Rogers, president and CEO of what is now the Food Industry Alliance of New York State.

Retailers are wary of the supermarket becoming "the dumping ground of society's ills," he said. If our playgrounds and parks are littered with broken bottles, pass a bottle bill and make the retailers collect all of the old sticky bottles. Little Johnny can't add two plus two? No problem. Pass a unit pricing law and make retailers change the way they price merchandise because the schools didn't do their job. Can't eat fish because of high mercury content? Pass a battery bill and place the burden of compliance on the retailer.

Jim's point was that retailers are the ones who end up doing the heavy lifting on programs like bottle bills, SNAP and WIC. And retailers want a legitimate say in how those programs operate--before the UPS guy drops off a bunch of terminals.

Any EBT program worth its salt involves retailers from end-to-end in the program. This goes beyond a cursory meeting as the project is getting ready to launch. It involves sitting down with retailers before the RFP goes out, seeking retail input during system design and taking retailer concerns into consideration for system operations. It might even involve having retailers help evaluate the retail management solutions in vendor EBT proposals. Programs that involve retailers from the beginning tend to have the fewest problems.

There are many stakeholder groups whose concerns must be addressed in an EBT project. They include, without limitation, consumers, retailers, federal staff, the state agency, and the EBT processor, its vendors and subcontractors. All should be involved in the development of the project. But the difference between retailers and their customers on one hand, and the rest of us, on the other, is best explained by the old "ham and eggs" theory. When it comes to making a plate of ham and eggs, there's no doubt that the chicken is involved. But it's the pig that's really committed.

So it is with EBT. We're all involved, but it's the retailer's store, his customer, and ultimately his livelihood that makes him really committed to the project.

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For a deeper discussion of what retailers expect out of WIC EBT catch "Retailer Expectations with WIC," Monday, 2:15-3:30 pm at EBT The Next Generation. This session features Jennifer Smith, senior manager for regulatory compliance for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

To register or for more information, click here.

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