My wife Debbie recently downloaded an app from Walmart. It’s designed to save you money.
If you shop at Walmart, you probably know that they offer to match prices from other stores. If you bring in proof that a price you are about to pay or paid is lower someplace else, they give it to you for the cheaper one, or credit you the difference.
With today’s electronic infrastructure, they are now taking it to the next level. It’s incredible and scary at the same time. If you’re worried about what the government can do in terms of digging into your life, just download the price comparison app from Walmart and see how a major retailer can play with big data.
I’m not saying right off that it’s a bad thing. The app saves you money. It does the job it’s supposed to do. But when you THINK about what goes into it, that’s when you start to wonder how far a company can go to mine information about your purchasing behavior and feed it back to you instantaneously.
Here’s what it does. You buy something at Walmart. The app then looks at all the stores around it to compare. How the app gets all this information is anyone’s guess. Do they have a human being that goes to every retail outlet within 10 miles and checks the price of every single item on the shelves, and inputs them into a handheld device so it can be beamed into the data banks? I think not. They would need hundreds of people and lots of time to do that. There would also be lots of room for human error.
Instead, someone has invented the software that downloads and calibrates all that information. It’s mindboggling. The electronic interconnectedness is massive. Not only must all the initial information from every comparable item from every nearby store be downloaded, but it also must be updated. They must get the sizes of the products correct. They must get the brand right. Sales prices that change day-to-day or week-to-week have to be figured in.
Once the app is running, changing prices have to be incorporated. How many price changes on a daily basis are there in any given supermarket?
Walmart must have access to the data from all these other stores. Which probably means every store has access to every other store as well. Which means they’re all aware of what the others do, and also very aware of what you do in terms of your purchasing patterns.
Case in point when it comes to the app knowing about you came when my wife strolled into Walmart recently and her smart phone kicked on and sent a greeting from Walmart. It probably told her to go to aisle 3 for a sale on fruit cups and aisle 12 to find the new deal on her favorite yogurt. If the app doesn’t do it, it will soon.
The ability for companies to identify purchasing trends and other information about who we are as consumers grows with each previous level of technology. It keeps compounding. Start playing one game on your personal device, and they start sending you others. Download one music app, and ten more come your way.
I’m not sure where it all stops, but I do want to know the answer to these two questions: “Who invents this type of stuff? Who captures the data and keeps it updated?”
I’d like to be in the back room, watching these people cackling away, cracking their knuckles, rubbing their hands in glee as they decide how to throw another scrap on the floor to see if we will devour it. Sometimes we need to walk away hungry.
If you shop at Walmart, you probably know that they offer to match prices from other stores. If you bring in proof that a price you are about to pay or paid is lower someplace else, they give it to you for the cheaper one, or credit you the difference.
With today’s electronic infrastructure, they are now taking it to the next level. It’s incredible and scary at the same time. If you’re worried about what the government can do in terms of digging into your life, just download the price comparison app from Walmart and see how a major retailer can play with big data.
I’m not saying right off that it’s a bad thing. The app saves you money. It does the job it’s supposed to do. But when you THINK about what goes into it, that’s when you start to wonder how far a company can go to mine information about your purchasing behavior and feed it back to you instantaneously.
Here’s what it does. You buy something at Walmart. The app then looks at all the stores around it to compare. How the app gets all this information is anyone’s guess. Do they have a human being that goes to every retail outlet within 10 miles and checks the price of every single item on the shelves, and inputs them into a handheld device so it can be beamed into the data banks? I think not. They would need hundreds of people and lots of time to do that. There would also be lots of room for human error.
Instead, someone has invented the software that downloads and calibrates all that information. It’s mindboggling. The electronic interconnectedness is massive. Not only must all the initial information from every comparable item from every nearby store be downloaded, but it also must be updated. They must get the sizes of the products correct. They must get the brand right. Sales prices that change day-to-day or week-to-week have to be figured in.
Once the app is running, changing prices have to be incorporated. How many price changes on a daily basis are there in any given supermarket?
Walmart must have access to the data from all these other stores. Which probably means every store has access to every other store as well. Which means they’re all aware of what the others do, and also very aware of what you do in terms of your purchasing patterns.
Case in point when it comes to the app knowing about you came when my wife strolled into Walmart recently and her smart phone kicked on and sent a greeting from Walmart. It probably told her to go to aisle 3 for a sale on fruit cups and aisle 12 to find the new deal on her favorite yogurt. If the app doesn’t do it, it will soon.
The ability for companies to identify purchasing trends and other information about who we are as consumers grows with each previous level of technology. It keeps compounding. Start playing one game on your personal device, and they start sending you others. Download one music app, and ten more come your way.
I’m not sure where it all stops, but I do want to know the answer to these two questions: “Who invents this type of stuff? Who captures the data and keeps it updated?”
I’d like to be in the back room, watching these people cackling away, cracking their knuckles, rubbing their hands in glee as they decide how to throw another scrap on the floor to see if we will devour it. Sometimes we need to walk away hungry.