Shaw's shoppers sue over credit-card breach

A couple who used to shop at the Melrose Shaw's is suing the chain's parent companies over a massive credit-card breach disclosed earlier this month - saying they never would have shopped at the store if they'd known it was overseen by a bunch of incompetent boobs unable to learn from previous retail breaches or even apply industry-standard security measures.

Joanne and Thomas St Pierre filed their suit last week in US District Court in Boston. They're seeking to become lead plaintiffs in a class-action suit against New Albertson's, Inc. and AB Acquisition, LLC, which own several supermarket chains, including Shaw's/Star Market, and Supervalu, Inc., which provides credit-card processing for the chains.

Had Plaintiffs known that Defendants did not abide by industry-standard cybersecurity practices, they would have paid less or not shopped at Shaw’s at all.

The St Pierres cite several articles on the breach (such as this one) on how it represents a lack of good security practices:

First, the widely reported breaches of point-of-sale systems at, among others, Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels Stores, and P.F. Chang's should have put Defendants on notice to ensure that their own systems were not vulnerable to a similar attack. In an August 15, 2014 story, the New York Times quoted Steve Hultquist, an executive at RedSeal Networks, a security firm, as stating that the Breach in this case "looks much the same as the attack that impacted Target last year." The Target breach was first reported in December 2013. The Target breach affected tens of millions of people, was the subject of a Congressional investigation, led to dozens of lawsuits and resulted in the resignations of Target's CEO and its Chief Information Officer.

They add the companies' promise to provide credit-monitoring services is worse than useless because thieves would use credit-card information to make individual purchases, which wouldn't affect a person's credit rating, which means customers are going to have to go through a laborious process of changing all the credit and debit cards they used to shop at the supermarkets.

In addition to their request to be lead plaintiffs, the St Pierre's are seeking unspecified damages, penalties and lawyers' fees.