TJX is brain dead as far as IT is concerned
A late comment but perhaps of interest: I went into a TJX store today, a "Winners/Homesense" place. To my delight they had a stock of excellent Costa Rican Terrazu coffee. When I went to pay, however, the bastards tried to nail me for both provincial and federal sales taxes. (Geographic reference: British Columbia, in Canada)
Coffee beans are subject to neither of these taxes. It took 5–10 minutes for the cashier to figure out the rather elaborate sequence of keystrokes necessary to override what the TJX computer thought the tax status of these goods was.
I don't understand why this was a problem, since every store in BC has to cope with the fact that some goods are not taxed at all, some get only provincial sales tax, some only federal, and some both. (Except food items, most items fall into the last category.) What I smell is an underhanded way to collect taxes that may never be remitted to the relevant government. But it may be, like their credit card data fiasco, simple incompetence.
Another data point re corporate IT incompetence.