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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."
...if you're drinking Budweiser, you've got bigger problems.
. . . about admitting you drink Bud.
Don't buy Bud. It's industrial swill anyway.
Drink a good locally produced microbrew instead.
People (men, in particular) will actually enter a store called Piggy-Wiggly when not accompanied by an infant?
Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands.
Just pay with cash and they'll never know it was you!
Anheuser-Busch: the Wal-Mart of beer. They can't stand the competition either...
I think this is a little more paranoia than we need.
If you bought directly from budweiser, they would know what you paid for, if it was cold, etc. So pipe down.
They can't really single out a person, or name a customer, there's no privacy issues here, at all. Just a company doing inventory control, to an extreme.
Runnin' On Empty
I didn't know about that, I'll have to try it sometime. All I knew about is their piss-colored-water stuff.
...that I never, ever buy their beer. Bletch. It's darks and stouts for me, none of this "making love in a canoe" crap.
They aren't tracking YOU, they are tracking the beer. Unless I'm missing something, they have no way of connecting any one person with any one beer.
Urine tastes like American beer.
Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands.
Then, don't buy bud!
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
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.
Does Piggly Wiggly have a kosher foods aisle?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Budweiser could stand to spend more on malt and hops instead of impressive IT systems... What's amazing is that they boast about using RICE on their beer!!! Rice is an adjunct that is used in beer to keep costs down and lighten up the body (read: make it more watery)
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
You know I've bought a lot of embarrassing things at the corner market and haven't even gotten discount coupons for them during check-out at a subsequent visit (a shame). And to the point, I've never gotten any kind of marketing material from Trojans in the mail as a result of having bought ribbed at Safeway, so if someone's correlating my personal information with my condom-purchasing history, they're not being very enterprising (if they were, they'd have sold the information to my wife long ago).
What I'm saying is, there's a tacit assumption in the article that somehow your purchases are correlated with your name. That's more likely to be happening at your credit card company's clearinghouse than at the cashier's station.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Privacy issues because they track their own sales?
This has about as much to do with security as...well...nothing. They don't track anything about -you-. It's a clever and quick way to track product info at a store level. They're not getting anything that some guy with a clipboard couldn't get. They're just doing it much more intelligently. Not EVERY technical innovation in marketing = big brother.
Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands."
They don't know when you buy your Bud, just when Bud is bought!
I'm a little confused as this isn't really your rights online and anyone that think that it is obviously didn't read the article. This is just and article talking about the information system that Bud uses to track sales of their products. It's a supply chain thing. They're not doing anything devious to go about this, just having people track prices and sales and actually doing something with data.
Anyone can tell you that beer distribution is complicated, this just helps them better their distribution. Take off the tinfoil hats, nothing to see here.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Not you -- SOMEONE Yes Bud knows when someone purchased their product but they don't know who and unless they have a survey team out, they don't know why. Stuff like this happens all the time and for the most part it tends to make life better for all of us.
Where we have to worry is when a company starts mining all this data and does track it back to an individual person. When a credit card company or polititical/religious/charity organization can pick up the phone and find out what I watched for TV last night and what books I last bought or checked out at the library, that's when we need to be concerned.
And even if personal data-mining is possible it's no guarantee it will be used. For example, the EZ-TAG scanners on the toll roads you take can easilly compute your average speed between toll booths and issue you a speeding ticket if you were speeding but they don't. Why? Because the toll road comissioners would be voted out of office if they allowed that.
what you paid,
Okay, this part is reasonable
when that beer was brewed,
I can see that they might be able to guess at this with a fair degree of certainty, but how do they know I didn't somehow get a 6-pack that's been sitting at the back of the shelf for weeks? Sure, it's got a "born on" date printed on it, but that's not part of the UPC, so how are they getting it?
whether you purchased it warm or chilled,
Again, same thing: it's the same UPC; how would it know, other than in aggregate (i.e. the distributor writing down how many 6-packs are in the cooler when he gets there.) And even if it knows in aggregate, how does it know that the guy at the liquor store didn't move a bunch of warm Buds back into the cooler when the distributor's rep wasn't there?
and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.Okay, this one's obvious, too.
I think we may have taken the fight for privacy to a new and illogical low? No wonder people lump tech geeks in with the tin foil hat crowd.
Dear Slashdot editor,
We at Budweiser would like to apologize for any anxiety you may have felt from the recent CNN article. As a token of our esteem, please accept the enclosed Budweiser hat.
Sincerely,
BudMan
BM/css
encl:
Tinfoil Hat, mk II, RFID
For the love of God people, I'm as much of a privacy advocate as the next man, but MAYBE it's time to take the tinfoil hat off. Why on earth would you care if Budweiser knows when and where bottle #564,356 is sold? It just sounds like good business to me. Besides, it's not like they're doing it for real beer like Guinness or anything. :-)
Keep Austin Weird!
If you don't want them tracking your name, then get your friend's older brother to loan you his ID, or hang around outside the store asking if someone will just pick you up a case.
On this note, why is the legal drinking age in the USA so much higher than it is in Europe (typically, 21 vs 18)? My own personal hypothesis is that the need for cars to get to/from bars in the USA (due to their spread-out nature) means that DUI problems would skyrocket if the drinking age were lowered to 18. Anyone else have some suggestions?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
But drinking Bud always makes me that way.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
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.
Personal Website
This Bud's for you, 372-81-4432. And you, 363-90-1125. And you, 352-10-8873...
Why the very thought of anyone drinking such a low class beverage has CAUSED MY MONOCLE TO POP RIGHT OUT! And really, who drinks beer in this day and age anyway? Everyone should drink only expensive wine and scotch.
Why just the other day my chauffer took a wrong turn off of the freeway and pulled me past this run down little liquor store where this shabby looking man (who by the way was driving a Pontiac! A PONTIAC!!!) who hadn't shaved for a couple of days was walking out with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. RED LABEL?! I exclaimed, exhaling a puff of cigar smoke and tipping my top hat back in a bemused manner. WHO ARE THESE CRETINS? I practically had my driver phone the police right then and there.
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".
Read. The. Article.
Bud is using Information Resources, Inc., which compiles register scan info. This includes those little barcoded keychain dongles that let you get special discounts -- you know, the ones you filled out a form with your personal information to get?
So, no, Bud can't trace EVERY beer purchase to the individual. And they most likely don't really care which particular individuals buy stuff, they're looking at demographic trends. But data on retail sales to individuals, and personal information abou those individuals IS in the system. That's how they get some of their demographics.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
Insert 'Free as in beer' VS 'Free as in Speech' joke here.
Eagles may fly, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
You know, I'm as concerned about personal privacy as the next slashdotter, but come on, this is just good supply chain management.
They have no idea who purchased their beer, they're not keeping your personal buyig habits ina massive database to use against you when you run for president. They're just trying to make sure that everytime you walk into your local store, they don't lose business because you want one of their products which is currently out of stock.
AB makes a product here in Texas called Ziegen Bock, not my personal favorite, but I know people who like it. It's primary competitor is Shiner Bock. Now I'm sure the AB people want to make sure that they don't run into cases where Shiner is in the store and not Ziegen. This benefits my friends as they also want to make sure that Ziegen is there so they don't have to get back in their cars and go to the next store down the road. Oh look, incentive for the stores to help AB in this data collection.
I see a win-win-win situation here, not a threat to my personal privacy.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -RAH
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.
In ancient Sumer. That's right - in IRAQ.
Obviously, Beer (which the membership of al Qaeda are commanded by God not to drink) is in league with al Qaeda, just like the former secularist government of Iraq (which the membership of al Qaeda was commanded by God to overthrow.) Whatever the article-author may think - it is clear that cool, refreshing beer, or even hobo urine like Budweiser, is more of a threat to our freedoms than the brave members of our law enforcement community.
Therefore, DARPA has asked Anheuser-Busch to help them keep track of the treasonous fluid. Don't get me started on those frenchies and their wine.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
"I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands."
Funny, I think I always choose to buy other brands. But that's just me. Having taste buds.
blog |
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.
First, to be clear, Bud doesn't know what 'you' bought. That would take them matching data from the credit card [assuming you purchased with a credit card], which they don't have access to, to the scanner sale [which only records what product was scanned]. All they are doing is making sure their product is available, all the time, and in the right product mix for the store/neighborhood.
/. is that way, right?]
A big problem in the beverage industry is 'out-of-stocks'. Most retailers use direct-store-delivery for beverages [bottlers put the stuff on trucks and tell the truck - sometimes in transit - where and how much to drop off at each store]. Before scanners, it could be days before an out-of-stock product was identified. Think about how much product moves off a shelf - per day, per store, per market - having no product on the shelf adds up quick.
The dollars manufacturers can lose due to out-of-stocks is huge. And retailers don't want empty space, and they don't want shoppers not finding their favorite product and going somewhere else. The manufacturer who figures out how to keep their merchandise in-stock efficiently will be a favorite of the retailer, especially if they are a big name like Bud, who also advertises a lot.
Companies like Bud use market research to determine the mix of products. Markets that have a higher Hispanic population may have a higher mix of beverages that cater to this group. But they don't know that 'you' specifically bought their product.
Nothing to see here...unless you're overly paranoid [but no one on
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
Who cares?
Every company tries to track their sales so they have a better idea where the advertising dollars should be spent. That boils down to more profits for them and better prices for you. Amazon.com does the same thing and so does every other retailer, wholesaler, distributor, manufactor, and website out there. So what if there is a name for BudNET? Every major retailer does it.
"Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands." Frankly, you need to live back before computers were around cause now EVERYTHING is tracked. They used to use pens and paper but now it is thrown in a database. I can go to work right now and, with the right information, pull up everything you have purchased there. At the end of the day, our computers process that information and break down what people are buying, when, why, how much, what accessories they get for that item, and then display it in easy to read charts of what we could do to improve our sales. The next day, we know what to push to maximize our margins.
This whole idea of anonymity is getting out of hand. Guess what? Anonymity never existed and has never been protected by any government. The idea of being anonymous came out of people getting lost in the industrial culture. Before the industrial age, you tended to have few choices on who to buy from, and the store owner knew you and what you bought. He didn't carry anything that you didn't want people to know you bought, because it would soon be getting around if you did buy it. Now we're using computers to pull that all back together, but mostly for the old advantages of knowing how to serve the customer better. Budweiser is not really interested in gossiping with others that you bought a keg, so what's the big deal already?
I know people like the idea of having a protective shroud of mystery surrounding them. I hate to break it to you, but it's just a false sense of security. If you do something worth noticing, you *will* get noticed.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I even have a certificate to prove that I'm a certified Beer Master. You wouldn't believe how much work goes into making such a thoroughly below average beer.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Executive presidents from Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing Company, and Guiness had just finished a long meeting and decided to go down to the pub to relax.
The CEO of Anheuser-Busch sat down and said to the bartender "I'll have a tall King of Beers!" and the bartender poured him a Budweiser.
The CEO of Miller said "It's Miller time!" and the bartender handed him a frosty Miller High Life.
The CEO of Guiness sat down and said I'll take a water, please.
The other two looked at him quisically, and the CEO of Guiness responded to their looks: "If you boys ain't drinking, neither am I!"
Make money with Real Estate Investing
Just don't buy this brand of beer. Boycott them. Tell others to boycott them. Write letters to their CEO and upper management as to why you are not buying their beer. Write letters to the editors of newspapers. Post this on protect our freedoms.
The reality is that as long as companies get a free pass on violating our rights, we will continue to lose them.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
If I pick up a 6-pack at the local depaneur (7-11, corner store, etc) and pay cash, and the clerk prints out a cheap receipt on a cheap non-networked cash register, Budweiser will STILL know who I am, and if my bear was chilled or warm?
What, do they have a secret network of x-ray thermal spy sats that record all purchases of their product?
This whole article is overblown and exagerated. Not to mention it doesn't apply to many (most?) stores. At least around here. I don't know of too many corner stores around here that ask for your personal info when you buy beer.
[01-03-04 09:44:31] Beer Location: On the delivery truck.
[01-03-04 10:26:54] Beer Location: On the store loading dock.
[01-03-04 11:54:12] Beer Location: In the store refrigerator case.
[01-03-04 19:22:57] Beer Location: In customer's hand.
[01-03-04 19:24:03] Beer Location: On the store checkout counter.
[01-03-04 19:31:44] Beer Location: Outside the store.
[01-03-04 19:32:10] Container Event: Can opened.
[01-03-04 19:32:12] Beer Location: Inside customers mouth.
[01-03-04 19:32:12] Beer Location: Outside customers mouth.
[01-03-04 19:32:13] Beer Location: On the ground.
[01-03-04 19:32:17] Beer Location: In the gutter.
[01-03-04 19:32:23] Container Event: Can dropped.
But to make the hat, I have to buy the cans! Classic chicken/egg problem. Arrgg!
Please help metamoderate.
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.
Man, some people really need to relax.
... You know that broadband bill you pay? There's a company keeping VAST logs of every hit through their servers that you make. I'd worry about that before I worried about somebody making sure there's beer on the shelf when I go shopping.
Guess what
First I'll mention Publix, who advertises that they give you the sale with out a card!
When I don't shop at Publix (usually 3:30am or something) I apply for a new card everytime I buy something. Some stores make this easy by allowing you to pick up a form, check a box indicating you don't want to tell them anything, and hand it over. Others require you to fill out bogus info, in which case I bug the cashier, and they usually have one handy to swipe. You can always use the person in line behind you or if all else fails, fill out the form, with bogus info of course.
I also make sure to ask the employee to tell their supervisor how unhappy I am with the supermarket for doing this.
If more people would get a new card every time, the stores would stop doing this because of the expense of making the cards.
If the store wants to track my purchases, they can do it the old fashined way, via my credit card!
(I beleive publix only exists in the south eastern US)
It's not like they're putting RFID's in the cans/bottles and finding out how long it took you to polish off the six-pack you bought on Tuesday night.
In fact, as far as I can see, the data is not purchaser-specific and is focused more on the retail outlet's presentation of Bud with respect to other brands. So, who cares? If it focuses their marketing, let it.
Bush Lies On the Record.
Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands.
If you insist on being a covert budweiser drinker, i'd like to introduce the concept of "shoplifting". Walk around and get your ordinary stuff, and put the budweiser in your pocket. Then you pay for the non-budweiser stuff and just pretend you never took the thing. Simple! Just don't get caught or the men with the shiny badges will put you in a really small place with metal bars they call "Jail" or give you those notes that say you need to pay alot of money.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
It's almost completely tasteless. All that fresh beer tastes better *bollocks*. Why on earth would you choose that in favour of a decent beer, like the original Czech Budweiser.
http://www.budvar.cz/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Now I'm worried about my main pimp...don't tell me those bitches are carrying...
It always amazes me that it's the same people that scream and shout about privacy issues that come to websites like this one and continually post responses and journal entries about their stance on issues of political, corporate, and other signifigance. If you think somebody could build a profile about you based on the beer you drink, imagine the profile they could construct by piecing together every post you've ever made to websites on the Internet.
I hear each Bud is laced with an individual chemical compound not unlike a DNA for beer (or serial number). So they already know where you buy and once you piss the bastard out they have engineers down all sewer systems with receptors matching your DNA with the beers.. and bing bango NO PRIVACY FOR YOU!
serenity now!
The salesmen filled mark-sense cards, which were sent to a contractor who gave back weekly reports (on reams of computer paper).
We wanted to bring this back in-house. Naturally, we thought of using a portable computer for this. Of course, 25 years ago, nothing would do, so we brewed our own, based on a Motorola 8 bit chip.
Trouble is, the thing was so big that we had to hide it in a book...
Alas, as usual, politics canned the whole project, and we simply managed to buy a mark-sense reader to read the sheets in-house...
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!
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
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.
I can't beleive they would be tracking my beer purchases!! those bastards.. think of what might happen.. they might make beer cheaper, or more available or cold when i want it that way.. son of a.. @#%#@^
can you say paranoid?? They may be the first beer company to track sales as they happen, but they are certainly not the first industry.. this happens everyday.. you better not buy anything ever again!!
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
I think it's a great application of data collection and data mining. They are collecting a load of data, some of it automated, some of it gathered by humans, integrating it, and using it to drive their supply chain. Isn't this a good use of IT?
...
The article is in the wrong category and is misleading, as numerous other people have pointed out.
Why not resubmit with a different category and talk about the novel aspects, like taking what the delivery guys observe about other items on the shelf and the clientelle, and how that gets fed all the way up to marketing plans? That's the real jewel of the article
This privacy stuff is getting out of hand...
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.'
It does NOT bring up any privacy issues, interesting or not. It's marketing data and there's no personal connection to the consumer whatsoever. Budweiser has a business obligation to determine where and how their product is selling.
Just because they say "you" in the text doesn't mean that "you" are part of the data collected. They're just using a purchase that sounds familiar to "you" to give "you" a frame of reference.
I'm surprised none of the privacy nuts have muttered the words "Ashcroft" or "Bush" in this thread yet, for no good reason, as is usually the case.
RP
After growing up in St. Louis, I practically grew up on AB beers. once I moved away I started drinking brewpub beers, and then started home brewing myself. after that I had a sense and appreciation for good beer, and now the only time I drink Bud is if I'm visiting STL. it's like drinking water now; you can't taste the hops or anything like you can in a good/well made beer.
P
free ipod and free gmail!
That's hilarious satire, friend. However, diparaging tasteless macrobrew isn't about elitism, it's about respecting beer. Brewing in the US is still recovering from prohibition which wiped out all our small breweries. Gourmet beer drinkers are succeeding in recultivating appreciation for craft brew in our country. In Germany, it would be false advertising to brew a rice-based beverage like Budweiser and call it beer.
The gourmet coffee craze has changed the coffee industry. It's not just monocled Bentley owners who choose a $3 cup of gourmet aribica over a 30 cup of Folgers today. I see plenty of constuction workers at my local Starbucks. The same thing is happening to beer. My local grocery store now carries a $20 per bottle Belgian beer.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
If you have a garden, you can use it for slug bait.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Last Saturday, I purchased a 6-pack of Guinness (in bottles) from the Kroger in Clarkston, GA. No, I do not live near there.
I paid approximatly $7.50.
My intent in purchasing the beer was, in addition to enjoying its smooth robust flavor, performing a demonstration to amazed friends on how to remove the magic "rocket widget" from an empty Guinness bottle (without breaking the bottle of course).
There, I said it. Now the entire world knows what beer I purchased, when, where, and why.
What is the WORST thing that can possibly happen to me by making this public?
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I agree with consensus that nobody should care about anonymous purchase stats, but I had heard recently that people's alcohol purchases on a grocery club card were used against him in a civil suit where he 'slipped on water' in the store.
Maybe this person was a scammer, but it bugs me knowing that they track every item that I buy.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
tell people you bought a six pack of Guinness so they shouldn't be paranoid..
BRILLIANT!
The local public utility has been tracking my water usage for years -- and they make me pay them to do it!! Worse than that, the long distance phone company not only tracks my phone calls, but they even track who I call and how long I am on the phone. My grocery store tries to track my grocery buying, but nobody lives at that address. However, Walmart does not have those stupid "shopper cards", so I shop there. Heck, I even think /. even keeps a record of when I respond and what I respond to.
You can't hide!
Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands."
....... Hello?
The guys at the airport sticking their fingers up everyones asses pales in comparison to this outright violation of my civil liberties!! I think it's time for a revolution! Who's with me?
Hello?
What you say is correct. But also, in times past, there wasn't the ability to store information as there is today. Sure, records were kept (and I'm grateful, I've used store records several hundreds of years old in genealogy research - it is fun to see what your ancestors bought), but they were handwritten, on paper likely a little more dear in value than paper is today. So not everything got written down. Which is why genealogical research can't go back beyond several hundred years geneally, maybe to 1066 for English ancestors. It was simply too expensive, too unimportant, or too troublesome, for records to be kept on daily activities, unless you descend from somebody famous or wealthy. So my first point is
(1) The cost of keeping records, not only financially, but in busywork, meant that much less was tracked.
Additionally, as you point out, customers likely knew the shopkeeper personally, and very well at that. It was the nature of the infrastructure of the day. For most people, it is likely that noone knew about them outside of a radius of 10 miles or so (except family/freinds from places they migrated from, naturally) - there simply was no reason to benefit to knowing this. Thus,
(2) any use made of a person's personal information would be likely known to the person, or at least, the person would be local to the perpetrator and could more easily see the results of the use. There simply was not the chance of long-distance identity theft such as is so well documented with our present infrastructure.
Additionally,
(3) With surveillance cameras and recording of their signals, etc., there is alot of records being made of aspects of our life which, while publically available in the past, were not recorded. Thus our actions, while public, had a certain nonpermanence about them which is rapidly eroding away.
I have a freind who is very concerned about this last point. He has come up with a doctrine he thinks should be incorporated into our jurisprudence - the doctrine of forgettability. He argues that while our actions in public have no legal "expectation of privacy", we did have a de facto situation where our actions were forgotten as they were not permanently recorded. Surveillance cameras, ATM and credit card transaction recordings, and on and on mean that our behavior is recorded whereas it would have been 'forgotten' in times past.
As a last point, (4) increased permanence of records
The last point is debatable, perhaps, as computer records are more easily deleted, too. There is likely a ton of information recorded and later deleted. But with backups, redundency, etc. I bet many of our records last longer than records of the past.
Overall, our records are more detailed than at any point in history, more accessible to 3rd parties than at any time in history, more accessible from long distances, and, likely, more permanent than ever before.
We may have not had anonymity before, but the lack of anonymity was localized. Localized in time, localized in space, and what information did last through time or was available to 3rd parties or parties at long distances away was much, much less than what is available to such parties today.
The week after 911, we had a discussion in a class, one of my colleagues/costudents stated he thought we are now in an era where privacy will have to be thrown out for the public good, an age of non-privacy, if you will.
Is he right? Seems we are well on the road in that direction.
try offering to pay cash instead of using a card next time you have a large purchase somewhere. Chances are you can get them to knock a few % of the cost. If you know what the processing fees are, you can really use this to your advantage.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Are we being overly paranoid here... Unless they are checking and recording ID's at the door to gain Individual buying habits, I don't think this is intrusive, just good business sense. It would seem to me this is why, among other reasons, AB is number one. Inventory control SHOULD be a high priority. Beer, with a definite shelf life, is one business where this would be a benefit to the consumer.
You think that's bad? The bartender in our local pub keeps track of what everyone has ordered, how much they paid, and even at which table they're sitting at. There's no privacy any more.
I'm not personally a fan of Bud, but I think most of the people crapping on it in this thread are doing so out of simple elitism. Most likely prefer beers that have been marketed to them as "sophisticated" like the hopped-to-hell-and-back Heineken, or, god forbid, Amstel, which seems to trade entirely on a fake European heritage to excuse the fact that it tastes like licking a skunk.
Hey, that sounds like fun!
t h E Q U Ickb r o wn F o x j u M P e d O Ver T Hel a Z Y D og
the Qu i ck B RO w n f o X Ju mpE d o v e R t he l az y dog
Now the problem is, I can't get the 13 line script through the lameness filters. Well, hell, get it from here then run it with:
clisp -q -i ransom-note.lisp -x "(ransom-note \"my dog has fleas\")"
(the file I said to download is just a text file, not really an executable like the webserver says.)
With all of the microbrews floating around out there - why would anyone choose to drink Budweiser?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"There, now there's a little bit more useless knowledge that probably squeezed some useful information out of your memory in order to make room!" Didn't work - my head is already filled with useless knowledge and yours went straight to the bit bucket. I've already forgotten your post and am know wondering why I'm posting.
Keep passing the open windows...
Amen. But try telling that to the people who get pissed off when I wear my "NASCAR is stupid" T-shirt. After a couple of minutes of staring at it they figure out what it says, spit tobaccey on me, and tell their sister/wife to go git their shotgun out of the camper. Then they say "You think yur bettern me, just cause you have a shirt on." I try to explain that I just don't like NASCAR (when they tilt their head like a dog, I rephrase it as NAASCOR and it registers) and it doesn't reflect in any way on how I feel about him personally. Then they think I am some kind of faggot for having personal feelings towards him, and I have to quickly leave in my "furrin" car before the little lady gets back with the shotgun.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
I am the network admin for a not-too-small Anheuser-Busch distributor. I can tell you a little about BudNET and how it tracks sales, from my experience. The original post states that AB most likely records your sale, what you paid, etc. As far as I know this is not the case in most operations. AB gets sales info from a distribution point of view. That means that they know what we, the warehouse, sold to the Piggly Wiggly, not what Piggly Wiggly sold to you, the retail consumer. When next we visit that Piggly Wiggly, we take an inventory. So in that regard AB also knows what the store sold between our visits, but not to whom.
All of the information that AB gets about sales comes from the distributors. A big part of my day is spent getting reports ready to go up to AB. The reports mention customer numbers, but these are *our* customers, not actual consumers. In some more advanced sales systems, retail pricing is indeed tracked. This type of information is used by AB and its distributors to do forcasting and the like. It is important to point out here that only retail stores who want to do so provide their own pricing and sales information to us. Most mom & pop operations don't bother. Many larger chains wich resources do provide this, as it also helps *them* to forcast. Once again though, we have no way of knowing what individuals are purchasing, or who those individuals are.
Also important to note is that much of our record keeping is mandated by law. The alcholic beverage commision in our state requires that we keep certain records on file for a given amount of time. This may be in addition to anything AB requires of us.
From the perspective of a network admin, BudNET is a pain in the rear. But I think that calling them Big Brother may be a little off the mark. Hope this helps to alleviate any major privacy concerns that you may have.
-haroldnjoe
um, why not? Don't they have a right to know what people are paying for their beer, or where it's purchased from? That's incredibly valueable information to determine where advertising dollars should go, if prices are competitive, what types of beer customers prefer, and a long list of other factors I couldn't even dream of. If anything this is a very good thing as it can only help Anheuser determine what to do to get you to purchase there products by giving you what you want, and to figure out what you want they must first determine if you like your beer warm or chilled, etc.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
By the way, for all the beer snobs out there (and I consider myself one of them) Anheuser-Busch is the worlds largest contract-brewer. Lots of mid-size brewersuse them to be able to produce and bottle large amounts of beer and then get that beer in the distribution chain. Sam Adams? for a long time more than 50% of all SA in the market was contract brewed by Anheuser-Busch (Miller Brewing now has the contract).
Yes, Anheuser-Busch produces bland beer. But form a beer making perspective, they are absolutely the best at being able to produce any kind of beer in the world and to do it well.
There's no personal data being collected here.
When they figure out how to track which of my ATM withdrawals are going to weed, cocaine, mushrooms, acid, or other such fun enhancers, then I'll be concerned.
Budweiser knowing how their stock is flowing concerns me not.
The good thing about beer (assuming one considers bud being a beer), is that if you drink enough of it, all those concerns about privacy will just go away... So keep drinking and you will eventually see that you really didn't have to worry about anything.