The holiday season is rolling around within the next month, but when it comes to consumer America, the biggest holiday is right around the corner. Coming right after Thanksgiving when everybody's good on the food front, Black Friday presents a means of satisfying every other appetite the typical consumer could have. $1 t-shirts! Ninety-five percent off! The kinds of sales that happen on Black Friday are truly unbeatable, and it represents the most popular shopping day of the year. But could this year's magical retail Friday be marred by the rampant store security breaches that have been sweeping the nation?
Breaches: A Barrier To Black Friday Sales?
Recently, Home Depot became the latest major enterprise to report a large-scale malicious cyber intrusion. When the news came out, it didn't really provoke any major ripples of shock. That's because over the past year, American shoppers have become conditioned to regard major corporate breaches as inevitabilities. Sure, maybe back when the Target debacle happened that was major news, but since then there have been so many similar incidents (think Paypal, eBay and Dropbox) that people are starting to become desensitized.
But they're still capable of getting pissed. According to CBS News, for instance, Home Depot is being flooded with lawsuits in the wake of its major breach, an incident that saw 56 million individual records potentially compromised. So far, there have been around 44 lawsuits filed against the corporate giant, and in all likelihood there will be more as the situation progresses.
So the question is this: How afraid are patrons of online shopping, and what kind of impact will that have on Black Friday this year? According to NBC, the so-called "Year of the Breach" is leaving some customers cautious when it comes to making purchases this season.
"The number of breaches and the caliber of breaches has people very worried. But it's also the fact that many of these breaches have moved from not only being on online stores, but also into physical stores," Gunter Ollman, chief technology officer of U.K.-based information assurance firm NCC Group, said.
Earning customer trust should be a priority for companies. And in an age of many breaches, that trust won't come easy. It remains to be seen how the breaches of this past year will impact year-end shopping, but what is clear is that customers are more Cognizant than ever about the risks inherent in just swiping a credit card.
