A 2.4 million card data breach cost Schnucks five hundred thousand dollars.
Not because of anything it did after the hack.
Because of a sentence somebody negotiated into a contract years before it happened.
The card networks came after more than one and a half million. A federal appeals court read the contract, found a liability cap, and sent the excess back.
Seventy-nine stores. Four months of harvested cards. One clause.
That is the whole story of this company, and it repeats in places that have nothing to do with computers.
Schnucks is a grocery chain that has survived ninety years by getting the boring paperwork right before it mattered.