Mighty Bargain Hunter

Deals may soon be harder to find at Wal-Mart

September 28th, 2006 | by mbhunter |

This article on MSN regarding Wal-Mart’s plans to measure customer traffic is market analysis on steroids.  From what I gather the system will track shoppers’ movements using IR and associate those movements with sales data.  Presumably this will allow the stores to tweak the product placement, display, and prominence of in-store advertising to boost sales.

Gathering data on shoppers’ habits is nothing new.  A few years back, Wal-Mart decided to stop sharing its sales data with third parties after reaching the conclusion that it helped its competitors more than it helped them.  It has the resources to do its own analysis, and it’s a big part of the retail market, so the statistics derived from the sales data still are meaningful.

This development of tracking shoppers’ motions is cool, while at the same time a little disconcerting.  Consumers have been studied, poked, prodded, and manipulated to see what the spending triggers are.  An accurate picture of most people’s buying habits is already available somewhere, waiting to be bought.  Having someone track my motions through Wal-Mart is akin to getting inside my head, though, and I wonder how Wal-Mart (or anyone else) would use these data.  Some thoughts:

• Where’s that deal?  Assuming that Wal-Mart and its partners are doing this to make more money, the high-margin products would become ever-more accessible and the low-margin deals would be hidden.
• What’s that smell?  If they’re shuffling around products and displays, why stop there?  Casinos use pleasant smells to keep the gamblers around — why not pump a little vanilla into the gourmet foods section or some of that new car smell into the automotive section?  Or some high-pitched noise in the waiting room of Tire & Lube Express so that you go back to shopping.
• How do you do?  Could regular customers train the tracking system?  What would come out of that?  Tailored pitches to me (or a group of people who shop the same way I do), perhaps set up hours beforehand automatically.  Costco already has a system set up to bring a manager over to pitch the premium membership based on my spending habits — what could a store do if the system could recognize me before I check out?
• When did that rollback happen?  Real-time price changes.  Instant sales.  Instant price increases.  Upsells.

Is this stuff possible, or am I just being paranoid?

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