Twisted Titan
1st December 2011, 04:24 PM
http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/big-box-brother-while-you-shop-the-mall-the-mall-shops-you/249057/
From Black Friday though to the end of the December, two malls in southern California and Richmond, Va., will be following shoppers by tracking their cell phone signals. When somebody walks out of the Gap, into the Starbucks, out through the Nordstrom and on to the Auntie Annes pretzel stand, the mall will be monitoring.
Creepy? Maybe. But the information is anonymous and won't be used to target individual shoppers. Instead, it's part of a quiet information revolution among retailers to figure out how crowds move, where they cluster, and what stores they ignore. Tracking crowds isn't new. Tracking crowds through their cell phones is.
If you've got a problem with malls paying attention to your smart phone, you might want to stay away from the mall for, say, the rest of your life. The future of shopping, according to retail analysts I spoke with for a recent special report, is malls and phones talking to each other.
From Black Friday though to the end of the December, two malls in southern California and Richmond, Va., will be following shoppers by tracking their cell phone signals. When somebody walks out of the Gap, into the Starbucks, out through the Nordstrom and on to the Auntie Annes pretzel stand, the mall will be monitoring.
Creepy? Maybe. But the information is anonymous and won't be used to target individual shoppers. Instead, it's part of a quiet information revolution among retailers to figure out how crowds move, where they cluster, and what stores they ignore. Tracking crowds isn't new. Tracking crowds through their cell phones is.
If you've got a problem with malls paying attention to your smart phone, you might want to stay away from the mall for, say, the rest of your life. The future of shopping, according to retail analysts I spoke with for a recent special report, is malls and phones talking to each other.