Credit cards play an interesting role in the security of our finances — or they can, if used well. They insulate our money from the institutions with which we do commerce, by placing the issuer in between. The issuer typically makes relatively strong guarantees about our liability in the event of misuse (often, in practice, assuming the entire cost of a stolen card number in terms of real dollars, if not time and effort), in return for shaving a few percent off every purchase when the card is used. Nonetheless, they are a handle into an individual's finances, however indirect, and recently every party in the chain from consumer to product has proven somewhat irresponsible with them. Consumers rack up charges they cannot afford; retailers, processors, and issuers lose transaction data and card numbers to employees and external criminals; issuers extend credit in ludicrous amounts, etc.
Given the general environment of irresponsibility with credit card data (Target, Neiman Marcus, and Home Depot being three retailers with recent very large scale breaches, affecting a hundred million or more total consumers), it appears that at least some retailers are taking steps. Today I tried to return some merchandise to a JC Penney home store with the original receipt, and was told that I could only take in-store credit unless the credit card used on the purchase was physically present. When I inquired as to why (since I haven't experienced this with a receipt in hand in many years), the teller said that JC Penney no longer stores credit card information after the transaction! (Presumably they keep it for some time until the transaction is actually cleared, and then purge it, but he was not specific about this.) I was both surprised and gratified to hear this, and it somewhat made up for the annoyance of being unable to return the items (since they were purchased on my wife's card). They could, of course, have returned my purchase price in cash, but I do understand that they don't wish to lose the card spread and fees in that manner.
I hope this is true, I think it's a good move if it is, and I hope it represents the start of a trend. It may be convenient to be able to walk into a store without a receipt and return an item based on credit card history, but it's not good security. I've certainly enjoyed that convenience in the past. I would give it up without complaint if it meant I didn't have to do the new-card-dance every couple of years due to a widespread data breach.