The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power

227 Pages·2017·1.62 MB·English

by  Joseph Turow

THE AISLES HAVE EYES

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of
1788, Yale College.

Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Turow.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947155
ISBN 978-0-300-21219-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
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For Judy
CONTENTS
1 A Frog Slowly Boiled
2 The Discriminating Merchant
3 Toward the Data-Powered Aisle
4 Hunting the Mobile Shopper
5 Loyalty as Bait
6 Personalizing the Aisles
7 What Now?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
THE AISLES HAVE EYES
1 A FROG SLOWLY BOILED
It’s said that a frog placed in a boiling pot of water will escape, but if the
water is slowly heated the frog will habituate and eventually die. Although
scientists dispute the accuracy of this statement, no one in the audience of
marketers objected—or even said it was ethically inappropriate—when a digital-
advertising executive used the image in an off-the-cuff suggestion of how
marketers ought to treat people in physical stores. The occasion was a
conference called The Internet of Things: Shopping that the online trade journal
MediaPost convened in Manhattan during August 2015. The speaker, vice
president of one of the world’s largest interactive agencies, wasn’t invoking the
frog image because he wanted to kill shoppers; he was addressing the concern
that people would push back against beacon surveillance. Department stores,
supermarkets, pharmacies, discount chains, and other retailers have among them
already placed hundreds of thousands of these inexpensive devices throughout
their stores.1 If shoppers carry the right apps on their smartphones and have the
correct technology turned on, the beacons will alert the merchants and they can
send the shoppers personalized coupons or other messages associated with the
goods in a beacon’s proximity. “We need to do a lot of hand-holding with our
customers in the new environment,” he urged. The goal had to be to treat
shoppers like “a frog in a pot of boiling water”: they had to be introduced to all
the changes slowly so that they would come to consider them as a normal part of
their lives.
Brandon Fischer, director of predictive insights at the influential GroupM
Next consultancy, offered a view of the in-store surveillance future that seemed
to embrace the frog comparison. In a keynote talk at the meeting, he predicted
that by 2028 half of Americans (and by 2054 nearly all Americans) will carry in
their bodies device implants that communicate with retailers as they walk down
the aisles and inspect various items.2 Based on how long you hold an item the
retailer’s computers will tell whether or not you like it. Other signals from the
implant will indicate whether you are nervous or cautious when you look at the
price of the product you are holding. The analysis may lead, Fischer suggested,
to a conclusion that a discount on the product may reduce your nervousness and
lead you to purchase it. His argument was a blunt, optimistic case for biometric
monitoring in stores. And just as with the frog-invoking executive, no one in the
room protested. No one wondered, either, whether in just thirteen years people
would realistically consider this activity natural.
The attendees’ nonchalance might seem strange, but the retailing business
was changing so drastically and confusingly that such statements may well have
seemed plausible. The message the marketers were hearing at the meeting and
throughout their industry was that retailing is entering a new, hypercompetitive
era with internet sellers. Brick-and-mortar merchants—the department stores,
supermarkets, specialty stores, and chain stores that are still the center of the
retailing universe—will succeed only if they figure out how to trace, quantify,
profile, and discriminate among shoppers as never before. But for stores to
survive this transition, shoppers will have to slowly learn to accept, even
welcome, those eyes in the aisles as part of their natural environment—sort of
like the frog in the pot of water.

This book is about how and why all of that is taking place, and the impact it
is having on individuals as well as on society at large. I’ll show how a new
generation of merchants—Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Stop & Shop, Safeway,
Lord & Taylor, and many more—is working with a set of technology
organizations to build a new future for physical retailing. They are reorganizing
shopping to capture data about us through the very media we carry, even wear
(such as a Fitbit). The goal is to routinely track us, store information about what
we buy and when, and score us based on that and other information. Different
forms of these activities are already under way in many stores. Retailers are
using increasingly sophisticated electronic monitors, which show up first as
experiments and then become ordinary elements of shopping. We typically feel
their presence through personalized discounts often linked to our rewards cards.
Depending on who you are and where you shop, you may already have
experienced early versions of the following situations—scenarios some shoppers
would consider wonderful:
• As you walk into an upscale department store, you may or may not
realize that your phone signaled your arrival. The store cares because you
belong to its loyalty program and have achieved high-value-customer status.
Your presence is indicated to a store representative, whose tablet calls up
your photo so she can recognize and greet you. The tablet also reveals which
clothes you looked at on the store’s website during the past week as well as
the clothes you clicked on when you accessed the store’s ads while visiting
other websites during that period. Based on previous purchases and the
information it has concerning your age, income, occupation, and family
status, the store’s computer predicts which of those garments you will buy. It
also suggests matching accessories, again based on your website visits,
previous purchases, and the special predictive sauce that mixes these
behaviors with demographic information. When you complete your shopping
and go to pay, you are pleasantly surprised to find that the computer is
rewarding your loyalty in the form of a 20 percent discount on your
purchases that day.
• You enter your local supermarket, with the store’s app on your
smartphone. The app instantly springs to life as you walk toward the first
aisle. It retrieves your shopping history and loyalty score from the firm’s
computers and links them to the shopping list and Web coupons you had
loaded on the app at home. The computer analyzes this information and
concludes that this is a stocking-up visit rather than a drop-in for only a few
items. Complex personalization formulas, which evaluate your shopping list
and your location in the store, present you with ideas about what to buy,
recipes based on what’s in your cart, and discounts. The formulas also factor
in information the supermarket has bought from data firms about your
socioeconomic status, and assessments on where you are on various product
buying cycles. Do your purchase patterns suggest you are at moderate risk
for switching away from a particular shampoo? Does your increasingly less
frequent purchase of a specific brand of diapers suggest a situation that can
be countered with a $2 coupon (through a deal with the manufacturer), or is
it likely your child is now potty-trained and so no longer needs them? Based
on your shopping history, the formulas predict the extent of discounts that
are needed to make you feel good about your shopping experience while also