Does this worry anyone?

It's one thing to collect data on one. But thinking that the Data
Protection Act does not 'really have' to apply to them when you request
your personal information is arrogant.

http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,1456,1573990,00.html

 

Doesn't worry me.

A lot of information that people would rather hide away is public
knowledge if you really want to look for it.

I'd be quite pleased if a company spend money researching me to find
out what I really like to buy. At least I'd stop getting stupid
adverts for things I'm not interested in, and would get better
targeted advertising for things I want to know about, exactly when I
want to know about them.

Current targeted advertising is little more than spam, but if it's
relevent to me, and arrives when I'm interested in it, then it does
nothing more than open up my options.

 

Not sure worry is the word. Concern yes, surprised - not one bit.

One reason why I don't have store loyalty cards. It's bad enough paying
by debit card because that's trackable - as evidenced by Sainsburys
having sent me vouchers in the past when I hadn't shopped there for a
while. Waitrose seem not to bother too much, thankfully.

I do think something needs to be done about the effect of the
supermarkets on competition and suppliers. However I cannot see that
happening for a very long time indeed as the government won't wish to
take on Tesco and Walmart.

 

Oh yes!

 

This is old news. The industry has been concerned about it for well
over 10 years. The original point of loyalty cards was to build up a
picture of customers - Sainsbury missed the point when they were
introduced, and thought they were just updated "stamp books" and
loftily said it wasn't going to issue them. They changed their tune
*very* fast.

The data provided by loyalty cards, and the instant EPOS data sent back
to HQ, gives supermarkets the power to do much, much more than just
monitor.

Supermarkets have contemplated "active pricing" - in other words,
jacking up the prices at different times of the day. Consider - someone
shopping at 11am isn't working. They may spend less. Someone shopping
at lunchtime probably is working. Someone who consistently shops at 7pm
is likely to hold down the sort of busy job where they can't get out at
lunchtime, and thus times the shop for after work. They probably spend
more, too, because people *do* if they shop before dinner, because
they're hungry.

So you hike the prices for certain commodities in the morning, and earn
more money from your (probably poorer) shoppers. This is such a hot
potato it hasn't been introduced - yet. But it could be. All you need
is a means of changing the price display on the shelves, since the
goods no longer bear price tickets themselves. Not difficult.

Secondly, you can experiment with the price/profit equation. Say you
list a quiche at 99p, and you make 33p profit from it. You sell 10,000
such quiches in a day. If you drop the price to 89p, your profit falls
to 23p, but you sell 20,000 quiches. You actually earn more. Again,
with instantly changeable price displays, you can do this sort of
exercise.

Welcome to 21st century shopping.

 

You could always shop at the local independents. You know the butcher,
bakers and grocers..?

 

If I was you, I would worry more about what everyone knows about YOU.
You'll find that there is more info about you on Google than any Tesco's
database.
5,670 messages to be precise.

 

The Tescos in Hove has digital price labels, I suppose they talk to some
central computer and can change as they display "none in stock" if the
shelf is empty.

 

Safeway were playing with this stuff a couple of years ago. Electronic
shelf edge pricing. The technology of it blew my mind when I saw how it
all worked.

As you say, it gives you all kinds of flexibility on pricing - the first
use touted around was a 'happy hour' where, at the push of a button, you
could reduce the prices on a whole range of products, or everything in
the store.

The downside is that, last I heard (2 years ago now) the wifi technology
wasn't robust enough to do this - when you issued a price change
instruction you always had a stack of units which failed to communicate
and needed a manual update.

Since Morissons bought the business, I haven't read of any further
progress on it - and I don't know of anyone else who was or is throwing
any real money at it.

The price of each unit at the time was something like £5-£10, but the
projection was that if you did it for the whole company you could get it
down to under £1 each.

 

This is going to have the biggest and, IMO, most socially destructive
impact on us.

 

Yes , I know I should get out more and leave this PC alone.

But I would like to think that I had some form or control over what I
put on the Internet. What do you think about Tesco's reluctance to abide
by the DPA.

As an aside:
If you looked at the images associated with Whittingham you will find
lots of them have black faces as a certain Sir(?) Whittingham had large
plantations in the Caribbean.
After he was ripped off by his white manager and accountant he decided
to educate certain slaves with 'promise' and they ran the plantations.
When slavery was abolished and the plantations were to a large extent
abandoned the very few well educated ex-slaves in the Caribbean all had
the adopted name of Whittingham.

So ends this lesson.

 

Tesco's and most other large supermarkets have satellite links to and
from their head offices to control just about everything from stock
levels, trends, local fluctuations, to ordering and price. It helps them
manage the "just in time" stock levels. (Some times)

 

Yes ISTR that Sainsburys didn't seem very clued up about their Reward
card initially. It didn't appear to be a strategic tool at all.

As so ably demonstrated by Tescos. It is one of those companies, not
unlike Microsoft or Google, where I am regularly surprised when they
launch their latest idea. I stop and think "where on earth did that
spring from" and before you know it their latest "venture" is doing
remarkably well.

Except that you need to be bloody careful about how and when you change
the prices. If someone selects something and it's gone up in price by
20p by the time they get to the till I can't see that going down at all
well. How does the customer "prove" what the price was? It's bad enough
with Tesco charging premium prices in their Metro stores on goods
clearly diverted from another branch with lower price promotion stickers
on them.

I can see why they have not yet gone down this particular road - it has
the potential to create some very bad publicity indeed for the
supermarkets. And one thing they do not like is bad publicity.

Well you can do it more effectively and cheaply than with conventional
"special offer" pricing but it's nothing new is it? This is just market
stall trading techniques raised to a new level of sophistication.

Or a return to 19th century shopping with some gizmos attached.

 

Why and in what ways?

 

Very smart the "designing our services so information is classed in a
way that circumvents disclosure provisions in the Data Protection Act".

Several years ago I worked on a data mining project to predict when a
customer "of a bank" was likely to defect. This was using a very small
subsection of information that they held. We were able to predict,
with a very high degree of accuracy when a customer was thinking of moving.

Given the improvements in processing power and artifical intelligence
techniques over the last seven years it doesn't surprise me that they
can do this sort of thing, especially with the ability to correlate
information from different data sources.

Suffice to say that I try to use cash for nearly everything. Also like
to randomly move cash in various amounts between accounts with at least
two different banks [1]. Like to think of it as keeping the data miners
on their toes ;-).


[1] Apart from actually wanting to see and feel the hard earned in my
hands at least once a month, otherwise it's just numbers .

 

Why?


-Will Dwinnell
http://will.dwinnell.com

 

That's 'cos none of your pikey neighbours have got jobs and can shop
during normal shop hours ...

 

Typo corrected

 

You're assuming I read your post ... s

 

Somewhere I shopped recently had this technology -- might have
been the Co-op supermarket I bought a bottle of wine from while at a
conference in Oxford last month. Not sure what the communications (if
any!) behind the LCD display was, tho'.

--
Ivan Reid, Electronic & Computer Engineering, ___ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD, DT175MX "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO# 003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".