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Microsoft Will Stream Ads To Grocery Carts
dptalia writes "Later this year, at ShopRite supermarkets in the eastern US, Microsoft will be rolling out computerized shopping carts. These carts will allow people with a ShopRite card to enter their shopping list on the ShopRite site from home, and then pull up the list on their grocery cart when they swipe their card. The new carts will also display advertisements depending on where in the supermarket the cart is, using RFID technology to help locate it."
If these fucking things make the slightest bit of noise, I swear I'm going to light it on fire, and start growing my own food.
So now when I put stump remover and sugar together on my list I gaurantee I'm gonna be put on some sort of terrorist list (cuz you can make a bomb out of that). Not to mention any other privacy concerns. I don't even want someone to so much as see my list before I get there. They'd have to password it. Then people forget their passwords. Or someone rigs it to record your password. Then you can't log in to your cart cuz the system is down and you have no idea what you were supposed to buy. I can only imagine how many rings of hell it would be to have Walmart employees support that high tech of a system.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I for one welcome the opportunity to rip one off of a shopping cart in the parking lot and seeing what's inside!
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It's 2008 and people are still going to the store? Do people have so much disposable time and so little else they could do with many extra hours a month that they still go shopping in an actual store? Do they look forward so much to driving around, dealing with parking, shopping carts, lines, people, their bratty kids, aisles, noise and lugging things around?
It's 2008 and the big innovation is a shopping car that spams you while it directs you around a bunch of aisles essentially the same way we did in 1945, but with more targeted marking and shelving placement than ever? Really? That's the best we can do?
Maybe it's a generational thing, but I have not shopped in a grocery store in almost my entire adult life. The last time I went into a grocery store was 1999. I get my groceries delivered to me with the click of a button. I decide what time I want my groceries, they come to my door and carry them into my kitchen. I spend almost zero time involved in groceries. While this is probably only available in big cities like the bay area, Portland, Denver and others, this is something that should be both available *and* used everywhere by almost every one. You don't still go out and butcher or milk your own cow. You don't go out and pick your own oranges. So why wheel a cart around like some sort of trained monkey in a store full of fluorescent lights and elevator music and snotty whining kids grabbing things off the shelves and throwing tantrums in the middle of the aisle?
Hell, I haven't bought shoes in person or tools or entertainment in person in years, either. Except for rare instances involving things like my car that can't be otherwise addressed, I have reduced actual physical shopping to something I no longer "have" to do. For years, the only shopping I've had to do is that which I *choose* to do. Things that make it a luxury. Places and things that I can enjoy going to and shopping for (such as home entertainment stuff). I farm the crap shopping off to the wonderful services that Albertsons, Safeway, Kingsoopers and others now offer (and before that, Webvan, etc).
So that there's a new little attachment to a shopping car that more efficiently delivers shit to your eyeballs while supposedly easing up your shopping situation -- IN 2008 -- is the least impressive thing I've heard this year.
Enter list online and have the cart calculate the shortest distance to each item in the store based on its current location
And it works, you fall for it too. How else do you know it was a SHELL gas station? If you were imune to it and not a sheep you would just tank at any gas station. (but without any advertising whatsoever, how would you know it is a gas station?) You obviously saw Shells adversting, yes even the sign that says Shell is part of advertising.
I did the same thing that the GP did, and the only reason I know it was a Shell station is because I explicitly checked once the ads started so I'd know which gas stations to avoid in the future. I wouldn't have known it was Shell if they hadn't made me care.
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So long I have waited to check 'grocery list' off my 'things I need a pencil for' list.
These shopping carts are just asking to be stolen. It's widespread enough as it is that simple shopping carts go missing. Carts with gadgets? Hell yeah. Just wait until somebody finds a way to make them into a digital picture frame, then they'll all be missing.
You seem to be under the impression that your view of this particular situation is the better one. Why is that? Why not just let the people who enjoy it, enjoy it. You'd do wise to take the Libertarian high road - don't assume just because it's *your* opinion of the matter that it's automatically the superior one.
Have you not had adverts blaring at you while taking care of business in a public washroom? Or is that form of torture reserved for the female of the species, since we're confined to stalls while we're in there? Of course, the possibilities for wide-screen above a row of urinals do come to mind, so they'll get you eventually if they haven't already. First time I saw this was in the ladies' at a beachfront bar--actually a pretty respectable establishment--where they blared commercials for waterfront properties. That was a couple of years ago. Most recent sighting was a couple of months ago at a favorite Chinese restaurant in a city 200 miles inland. It gives new meaning to the term "captive audience."
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
A lot depends on the store: some stores strongly believe the Piggly Wiggly model that says you make more money by putting "necessities" (diapers, toothpaste, whatever) at the back so that you'll impulse buy your way to and from the goods you need. Other choices are constrained by logistics and architecture: milk, deli and frozen goods are frequently kept at the back simply because the coolers have to be mounted with their service doors facing the loading docks. Other stores have different goals, and lay out their floor plans accordingly.
Most stores work long and hard with layouts. There's always a set of compromises to be made, and frequently original assumptions about traffic and shopping patterns turn out to be either wrong, or customers change their behaviors over time.
For example, some Apple stores used to have the Genius Bar located along the middle of the side wall, with the cash registers along the far back wall, and the "family room" for the kids somewhere in between the two. It looked great from the front door, and on paper. But placing the geniuses there led to large crowds of non-geniuses in the middle of the store waiting for the geniuses, blocking traffic to and from the cash registers at the rear. Worse, people were leaving the registers with large, awkward boxes tromping past piles of squirrelly children and negotiating the crowds. Their newer store layouts feature the genius bar along the back wall, and they moved the receipt printers/registers nearer to the front doors. Employees (who are theoretically more careful than random customers) now carry the clumsy boxes from the back rooms carefully past the piles of children to the waiting customers at the front of the stores, who now only have to pay and then leave.
John
Takes about 40 minutes of my time. And I get to go out and get various other things in the neighbourhood while I'm at it. I looked at shopping online but it wasn't worth the hassle (takes longer unless you always pick the same thing and ends up being more expensive).
If there were animated ads on the carts I'd shop elsewhere though.
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I have always hated how they fill bars with huge TV screens, sometimes several of them, showing MTV or VH1 or something. People go to bars to have a drink, chat and dance. Not to watch TV. But when I point this out, people say I'm crazy. I quit complaining because some people started looking at me as if I'm weird. What's the point of going out for a good time with other people and having to put up with distracting TV screens all around? The same in restaurants and cafés, just turn that shit off!
If your are clumsy placing items in the cart and break the screen have your bought the shopping trolley. On top of all that, with all those wireless trolleys in the supermarket, it will be radiating a lot of rf energy into the customers and more disturbingly into young children and where will the locate the antenna with regards to child seats in some shopping trolleys.
Of course you also have the hassle of building battery charging facilities into the shopping cart storage facility which now has to be completely under cover and temperature controlled to prevent condensation issues at the charging point. Yeah, it all sounds like a great idea in some marketdroids head, and M$ as always will make all sorts of vacuous promises, but when it comes to the actual implementation that's when all the real problems start.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As for advertising, the grocery story sends all sorts of stuff to "resident" in this area, anyway. The only difference would be I get my name on the To: address.
How long do you think it will be before these things get hacked into playing gore and porn on Aunt Nellie's shopping cart? And if that happens, how long do you think the stores will keep the system?