Anyone in retail IT looking for a good ROI argument should simply refer to an advisory to shareholders that Rent-A-Center issued earlier this month. The $3.3 billion, 2,600-store chain on Oct. 11 advised that its revenues were dropping — and then it pointed the finger at POS problems.

I needn’t point out that IT never wants to be discussed that way. But if you don’t work for Rent-A-Center, the explanation it put forward could be useful in making arguments for systems purchases with the CFO.

Explaining a 12% drop in same-store quarterly sales, CEO Robert Davis said, “Following the implementation of our new point-of-sale system, we experienced system performance issues and outages that resulted in a larger than expected negative impact on Core sales. While we expect it to take several quarters to fully recover from the impact to the Core portfolio, system performance has improved dramatically and we have started to see early indicators of collections improvement.”

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