For those who did not grow up or go to college in Michigan, there is a chance you do not know about Meijer (or, as it used to be called, Meijer's Thrifty Acres). And that's a shame. To call Meijer simply a "store" would be like calling the Queen Mary 2 simply "a boat". Ahead of its time by at least 20 years, Meijer was a city under a roof - a department store plus grocery store. And low prices. And open 24/7. (It was always fun buying some guppies for the fish tank from a less-than-knowledgeable employee in the pet department at 2AM. "No, I wanted a female."). Meijer is a family-owned business out of Grand Rapids that still thrives in the midwest, now trying to compete against Wal-Mart (sadly, the closest Meijer to me is about 20 miles outside Chicago).
While we always found the merchandise at Meijer to be more than satisfactory, it wasn't what you'd call top-of-the-line. To step up to the next level, you had to go someplace else: Target. As you probably know, Target has a long and storied history as an outgrowth of Dayton-Hudson, and has found its way into the hearts and pocketbooks of many American consumers using its combination of catchy marketing and reasonable prices. And those cool escalators for shopping carts that could fascinate any six-and-a-half-year-old boy. And his father.
While everybody knows Target, fewer know that subsidiary Target Brands is an active player in the U.S. patent world, holding about 90 design patents and 44 utility patents. These patents cover a wide range of products, including the extremely practical prescription bottle system (U.S. Patent Nos. D583,242 and 7,413,082), a variety of product display devices, and a plethora of gift card products (the most bizarre of which is U.S. Patent No. 7,438,224 that combines a credit card with garden seeds. I kid you not.)
Today, however, Target was issued its second true business method patent. (The first is 7,308,420 for a co-branded ISP.) Unfortunately, it's likely on the wrong side of Bilski:
U.S. Patent No. 7,512,547 Financial transaction approval system and method
Assignee: Target Brands, Inc. 1. A method of performing a retail transaction, the method comprising steps performed in the following order: determining a total cost of at least one purchase to be made by a consumer in the retail transaction; offering the consumer a first option to provide an endorsement and a final approval of the retail transaction prior to determining the total cost of the at least one purchase, to decrease the time the consumer spends in a checkout line of a retail establishment; offering the consumer a second option to provide the endorsement and the final approval of the retail transaction after determining the total cost of the at least one purchase; receiving the endorsement from the consumer; and receiving the final approval from the consumer; wherein the consumer is free to take the at least one purchase away from the retail establishment only following offering the consumer the first option, offering the consumer the second option, receipt of the endorsement and receipt of the final approval from the consumer in completion of the financial transaction.
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At first blush, it looks like Target is essentially claiming the broad ability for its customers to sign the credit card receipt while the clerk is still ringing up items. Am I missing something? I guess they have to give the option to the consumer to sign either during or after everything has been rung up.
Interestingly, there was a 101 rejection way back in the first office action in 2005, when the Examiner found the original claim 1 to claim an abstract idea. Target overcame that by adding the words "with a processor" to its method, but eventually canceled the claim in light of prior art rejections. 101 was never raised again, even when the examiner gave the Notice of Allowance in January 2009.
Of course, if Target had similarly amended their other claims, I might not have had anything to write about today. (Well, it certainly wouldn't be as fun.)
One more to close things out:
U.S. Patent No. 7,512,548 Use of shopping cart to collect and purchase items selected from multiple web sites Assignee: Amazon.com 1. A computer-implemented method of facilitating the purchase of items selected from multiple different web sites, comprising: tracking a user's selections of multiple items from multiple different web sites, wherein each web site corresponds to a different respective business entity and Internet domain name; presenting the multiple items to the user as contents of a single, personal shopping cart; providing the user an option to purchase the multiple items from the shopping cart as a single transaction; and maintaining a record of said shopping cart contents on a server between user sessions such that the shopping cart remains persistent over multiple user sessions, said server being separate from a computer used by the user to make the selections.
This patent has a long prosecution history (filed in 1999), including a reversal at the BPAI last year. But all the rejections were 102/103, and 101 never was raised.
There are at least four possible "particular machines" here: 1) the computer that's implementing the method, as stated in the preamble; 2) the multiple different websites; 3) the server holding the shopping cart (possibly the same as 1)); and 4) the user's computer for making selections. Question: which, if any, do you think is the "particular" machine tied to this method under Bilski?
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