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BudNet Tracks Your Suds
An anonymous reader writes "CNN is carrying a story about Budweiser's national internal sales tracking network called BudNET. It allows Anheuser-Busch to instantly track sales across the country, and 'If Anheuser-Busch loses shelf space in a store in Clarksville, Tennessee, they know it right away.' It brings up some interesting privacy issues, because according to the article 'The last time you bought a six-pack of Bud Light at the Piggly Wiggly, Anheuser servers most likely recorded what you paid, when that beer was brewed, whether you purchased it warm or chilled, and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.' Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands."
They do that in two ways (again, according to the article): a "nightly sweep of their distributors' databases" and 2) on-site visits by sales reps who notice how the store is set up, whether it's selling room-temp or chilld beer (or both), and probably noting the class of customers.
Despite Michael's concerns, there's nothing in there about tying to individual customer purchases or even getting explicit sales data on competitors' products.
Yes, who knows what sinister things Bud will do with information they legally gleaned. Of course legal doesn't necessarily mean moral or right, but in this case I fail to see how Anheuser-Busch is going to violate your rights or do anything with the modicum of information they gather. Hell, I can't even find any info in the article that points to anything about tying a purchase to an individual rather than a store.
I can understand their interest in better tracking of inventory, but it done be amazing the lengths they go for profit other than to improve their brands. I'm sure they, like Miller and others, picked up a few microbreweries during the boom in the 90's, but if they watered them down like their own flagship brand then it's a self-defeating measure. (Budweiser shorts on expensive malted barley, using 40% rice)
I've known enough people who work in stores (or have worked for distributors) and the pressure for sales space (particularly at the expense of competitors) usually is waged with inducements, like clocks, TV's, trips to the Super Bowl, etc.
After all the advertising, all the tactics, all the analysis, it's still like Eric Idle said. It's worth pointing out to Bud fans, who stand by their 'beer' like it's Mom, Apple Pie and the Flag, that this company didn't become hugely profitable by following the Reinheitsgebot.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
People.. Read the article fully. They track the BEER, not the person. Information like that is extremely important for the marketing of a product.
This information allows them to know there market, plan shipments and various other usefull things.
But instead you would prefer to assume they are tracking how many brain killing gulps of beer your drinking so they know when your drunk enough to use there super secret beer tracking brain scanner to download your life and the history of your poor sex life.
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Unfortunately, at a growing number of stores, including every single grocery store in my area, thay want you to carry and use a card that identifies you to the system even if you do pay cash. Of course, you can not cary a card, but then you don't get any of the sale prices, and more and more items seem to be "on sale". Of course, the sale prices are still higher than the items were before the cards, and higher than the items are in areas where they don't have the cards. So yes, you can pay cash, but be prepaired to pay a few bucks extra if you want to retain your privacy.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is not big brother trying to control you life.. This is a company trying to do the best job of marketing they can. They are putting together as much data as they can, to market and sell their product as efficiently as they can.
Their not tieing this to a record of an individual person. They are not providing the data to the "Office of Homeland Security" to determine who the terrorist / non-bud-drinkers are..
They're just trying to see who is buying their beer.
Then, they'll use that data to more effectively target the low-income urban minorities, to keep them under the yoke of "The Man".
Geeze it's just inventory tracking. There's no "you" in the tracking so give it a rest. I'm sick of this idiotic scaremongering over these non-issues. Companies have a right to track their inventory and always have. This is just tracking to point of sale over the country. It's not merely anonymous tracking it's amorphous, there's no distinction between any of the buyers, they're tracking beer not people and they absolutely have a right to do that.
Why would you drink Bud anyway? What a shitty beer. For all you non-USAians, contrary to popular belief, there are excellent beers in the States. Only Sheeple drink A-B and SAB (Miller) products. Disclamer: my father was a 25-year employee at Miller as a plant manager, and I grew up drinking Miller products. They are awful. I don't care if it paid the wages and for college. Man, is Miller Lite an abomination....
Something tells me that if people were to actually expand their horizons on the beer front, they would discover the Sierra Nevadas, Shiners and such that have nationwide markets and comprable pricing to Bud ($9 a 12-er compared to $11 a 12-er for Shiner). Guess what? These are small companies (relative to A-B) who are not going to fool with BudNETing your habit.
BEER: The cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems -- HJS.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Or just download, print and apply the the Ultimate Shopper's number and get your sale prices whilst still donning your tin foil apparel.
You know what?
For that matter, most of the folks in the military. You see, the simple fact is, alcohol is expensive. And the great thing about alcohol is, the more you drink of it, the less you care about it.
So, typically, you get a case or two of the stuff you like to drink, and a case or two of something cheap. [exact numbers vary by the number of people involved, their prefered drinking habits, and at what point in the night they become incoherent]
As people get more loaded, you give 'em the crappy stuff. They don't really care. This enables you to get some good stuff, and some crap, rather than settling on the mediocre middle ground for everything.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Pyramid Hefeweisen(sp?) - a light beer, but with a lot more character and a better taste.
Spaten/Spaten Optimator - german consumer beer with at least some character.
Ommegang - a somewhat darker and richer beer with a great, interesting taste. Try it.
Arrogant Bastard - A real beer drinker's beer.
All of these should be found at a Beverages and More! or your local equivalent.
I used to be a Guinness drinker, but the dark/heavy drinks became a little too much for me - especially when you're trying to have a meal with your drink. Shit, I don't have room for dessert because I had that Guinness!.
Others, please feel free to add your beer recommendations for Bud replacements!
Yes, the Albertson's chain went to a customer ID card about eight months ago. I suspected at the time that it was a way to raise the general level of prices on all the items without pissing off all their customers at the same time.
This is more-or-less what has happened. If you use a card (the cashier scans the barcode on the plastic card) then you get the sale items at about 20% less than the standard price. But at normal price, almost every item in the store is 20% higher than the other stores in the area.
In my neighborhood there are seven major grocery stores within a mile radius of my apartment, so I can take advantage of weekly sales.
That is, if I can find out about these weekly sales. I want to be able to go to a website and find out what each store is having on sale this week, and, what the normal non-sale cost is for each item for each store.
The stores treat this information like it was top-secret military data. They threaten anyone who records prices for comparison with arrest. There are signs all over the stores: "No cameras", "no notebooks".
Such contempt for the general public makes me very uncomfortable whenever I go into grocery stores nowdays. I've reduced my shopping at Safeway by about 95% and at Albertson's by at least 60% in the past year. The checkers are amiable but extremely slow. The management is scientifically selected to be crypto-fascist pinhead morons and the whole experience of 'doing' these stores is unpleasent. And I'm just a normal shopper: not a shoplifter or scammer.
The worst grocery store in the country has got to be Safeway. They constantly do bait-and-switch with items that are advertised at reduced price only to have you pay extra at checkout because the fine print shows that the item was not the sale item. Like for example, big signs saying that "Flavor Fresh" brand frozen peas are 79 cents for a pound. So you grab a pack only to be charged $1.29 at the register. Turns out that the peas you grabbed were "FlavorPac" brand which looks like exactly the same package AND was placed directly under the sign saying "Flavor Fresh" peas were on sale.
This happened to me so many times at Safeway that I call it the 'Safeway Shuffle' at the checkout; where they send someone back to check the price when you complain that you were overcharged. I was at the point where I was bringing a caliper to measure the width of the barcode line and comparing it to the barcode on the sale announcement, when I realized that there was a simpler and more elegant solution. Just get the fuck out of Safeway and don't go back!
I'm still amazed that they're still in business. But many places in California, they're the only store for miles around.
So, yes, I'm pissed that companies are collecting all this information about customers without allowing the customers to use it for their benefit. The internet really has changed everything: people really do expect a mutually benefitial relationship from all this information gathering.
This is the point that the business and management people just don't seem to understand. In the coming years, companies that share information with their customers will prosper and those that hoard and hide information will not.
Here's an interesting twist... the tinfoils in the crowd are assuming that Budweiser wants to track individuals with this. But that opens a can of worms for the beer distributors! See, then the Govt. could easily see who is selling to minors just by looking at Bud's database. There's no way the stores or the Beer companies want that data out. The beer companies have been doing well to push the whole "you must be 21 to buy" thing, but that step would make them now accountable.
2.) This would also make it easy to see who sold the beer that the drunk driver was drinking when he smashed his car into a school bus, further opening up the distributors to possible litigation in our sue-happy society.
A grocery store near me has those. It's a mechanism that locks up that wheel when it is taken off the store's property.
Also, the wheel would be a bad place to put a RFID transmitter. The movement and vibration around there, as well as the fact that transmission distance would be limited by being near the ground, mean that there would be better places for it.