Someone Is Following You
To know me is to know that I love supermarkets. I suppose I got it from my Dad, an Accountant by trade who loved being the purchasing agent for our family. He would peruse the weekly adverts in the newspaper, and knew where everything was on sale. Then he would go to all of the necessary supermarkets to get the best deals on the things we needed.
He took a lot of time doing all this, of course, but I suppose accountants are like that. Attention to detail, you know.
Naturally, as a young lad I wound up on a lot of his shopping missions, and along the way I became enamored of the method behind the madness at the big supermarkets. Things just weren’t put out randomly. No, it appeared there was a reason why things were where they were, such as forcing everyone to enter through the vegetables and fruit section, and then the bakery, before proceeding into the rest of the store.
I felt like a rat in a maze, but that was by design. Smart grocers knew that if you put those higher margin items up front while shoppers’ carts were empty, they were more likely to buy them. Cha-ching.
Oh, and that smell of baking bread I detected while we were walking across the parking lot to the entrance? That too was intentional. Simply make sure the exhaust from the bakery is belching out the smell of fresh bread, cookies, etc., and people will be drooling before they even grab a cart.
It was in grad school that I started focusing my studies on supermarketing. In my MBA I did a lengthy research paper on supermarket methods from the 1950s to the 1980s, which got into the two-way mirrors that market researchers used to monitor and track customers. For my doctoral dissertation, I built a logistic regression model that predicted whether a corporate buyer would accept or reject a new item to stock in the store.
Total nerd, I tell you. But I digress.
So when I read this morning of Albertson’s new in-store test of shopping carts that track the customers pushing them, my eyes were wide open. This is the stuff of my wildest dreams. They aren’t smart carts as we have started to know them, with onboard ads as well as scanning capabilities. No, these have a beacon built in, kind of like a GPS tracking system, that allows the store to keep a detailed record of your path through the store, how long you lingered in front of specific freestanding displays, end caps, or in front of the salsa section, etc.
Sidebar: You know you’re in the southwest when the salsa section extends for half the length of the aisle. In other regions of the country the shelf facings almost seem like an after thought.
This is powerful stuff, the kind of data that stores and manufacturers alike would love to have. They all want to know what works best in the store. What does it take to capture a customer’s attention, and keep it? In other words, what are the most effective speed bumps?
Also included in the mix is in-store advertising, which is about to become as prevalent as QR codes. If you pause to engage with it, they will know. Get used to it and get over it, just like at the gas pump. Everything is trackable.
Well, except for one thing. Albertson’s must be certain to link the specific shopping cart to the individual ultimately making the transaction and paying for it. Otherwise, the data are general to everyone and anyone shopping there. But when you can pair it with individual shoppers, like those who are logged into an app, now we’re talking. It’s the difference between panning for gold, and striking an entire vein.
Then there are people like me who will sometimes park my cart while I venture off on foot to find something, meaning the tracker in this special cart is going to think I am oddly in love with the frozen hash browns I apparently stalled out in front of. Can’t fix this.
Privacy concerns abound, too, of course, because while we all know we leave behind many breadcrumbs whenever we are out and about, some shoppers may not want to reveal this side of their shopping behavior. Rest assured, it is already being done online. Amazon knows not only the what, but also the how long. Albertson’s is just taking it into its BAM establishments.
As always, you could just pay cash, and in the case of Albertson’s, use a hand basket. Just know that this tracking technology is likely to spread, especially if Albertson’s declares it a success. Meanwhile, the database of our shopping and consuming ways is getting a little bit larger. There’s a lot to account for.
Pretty sure my Dad never saw this coming.
Dr “I’m Having A Cart Attack” Gerlich
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