Stores Continue to Stalk

While this article isn’t describing anything new, I find the way in which stores are using technology (even mobile technology) to gather data about shoppers… “interesting.” In looking at Meeker’s 2013 trends, we’ve seen how mobile commerce is the new medium for shopping and that retailers are looking for ways to take advantage of this medium to make more money.

This article talks about how companies such as Nordstrom (the company that is the center of my project) are used mobile technology to further advance their merchandising strategies.

Thanks to an experiment with Euclid, Nordstrom used your wifi signals, in combination with video surveillance, to track your movements in store. The idea was to count how many people have walked by the store, how many people have entered the store, those shoppers’ movements within a certain location of a store and other metrics such as how long a shopper looked at a product before buying it.

Is this a huge problem to anyone?

I personally don’t mind it. I’m a sucker for Amazon recommendations. It may come off predatory to some, but to me, this experiment is intended to be able to provide those very same recommendations in store. If the data from this initiative helps Nordstrom outfit their stores better, deliver real-time sales to me personally, put the products I care about in front of me, then who am I to complain? This technology (unlike some of the others described in this article) doesn’t seem particularly intrusive to me but, more importantly (and for the sake of this class), it is something that I think can be wildly implemented across other industries.

I know very little about hospital operations and patient tracking. But I imagine a similar technology could be applied to beds to track patients as they move around units within a hospital. Wait times would decrease, patient throughput would be accelerated and improvements could be made in facility design. Sure, some patient data may/may not have to be released in order for this to help but the overall improvement is helpful.

Or, cities could monitor your commute to figure out where potholes or other opportunities for road improvements are located. Instead of deploying people to "look" for potholes, this would be real-time alerts to the city, allowing them to make more informed decisions. Again, this becomes a potential debate on privacy, but the overall gain is valuable.

In the end, I suppose many people disagree: Nordstrom quit using the technology in part because shoppers said the company crossed the line.