Tom Sowa reports:
Some Spokane-area grocery stores, including all 12 Yoke’s Fresh Markets and 21 Rosauers stores, are telling customers that debit and credit card payments won’t be processed normally while investigators try to secure a computer network that was hacked over the past two months.
The data breach was reported in recent weeks by local banks and credit unions.
[…]
The 21 stores in the Rosauers group, which includes Super 1 Foods and Huckleberry’s Natural Market, offered 10 percent discounts to shoppers on Monday, whether they used a card or not.
“We feel it’s fair because we didn’t tell people ahead of time they’d have to go through this,” Rosauers CEO Jeff Philipps said.
Monday’s actions by the grocery chains followed a recommendation by URM Stores, the Spokane-based wholesaler that processes a large share of electronic payments made by shoppers at Yoke’s, Rosauers, Super 1 Foods, Family Foods, Harvest Foods, CenterPlace Market and Trading Co. Stores.
On Monday, URM Stores CEO Ray Sprinkle posted a notice on the company’s website urging most of the stores it works with to stop normal credit card transactions until the problem is solved.
Sprinkle said it’s not clear whether the data breach occurred at the store level, at URM or at Atlanta-based First Data Corp., which processes payment transactions for URM.
Read more on The Spokesman-Review.