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Facebook and Wal-Mart Join Forces
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Wal-Mart — the retail king of Big Data analytics — will be meeting Mark Zuckerberg for two days in Bentonville, to 'deepen' their relationship with Facebook. The CEO-level strategy summit is intended to bolster the relationship between the world's No. 1 social network and the world's largest retailer. Wal-Mart has been left in the dust online by the behemoth Amazon. An alliance may be poised to challenge this dominance, particularly in light of Amazon's planned foray into same-day delivery nationwide. The companies share James Breyer, who sits on the boards of both Facebook and Wal-Mart. Adding another angle to this, Yahoo's new CEO, Marissa Mayer, was elected to Wal-Mart's board in early June, while she was still at Google. Earlier this month, Facebook and Yahoo settled a patent dispute and announced plans to form another 'strategic alliance' involving advertising and distribution. The implications for online privacy in this series of relationships are uncertain."
"The implications for online privacy in this series of relationships are uncertain."
I think they are very certain. This will, as with every collaboration of large corporations who seek and retain your information, result in increased use of personal (and often private) information to increase the market and profits of the corporation. Any possible benefit to the customer will be inconsequential and very debatable.
Use facebook? Expect a confusing change in privacy policy to follow, with associated double-speak explanation that demonstrates how it's all being done for your benefit, not theirs. Thereafter expect to have a relationship with Walmart on a personal level you may not be comfortable with, whether you shop there or not.
Wal-Mart does not want you to use their website. Online shopping allows for informed decision making: you can easily compare prices of similar goods both within their own catalog and competitor's. You can find product and manufacturer reviews, look at price and sales history, etc. All of that runs counter to Wal-Mart's methodology of preying on underinformed customers. Wal-Mart maintains a low-price reputation by a small subset of inventory. That subset is indeed cheap, but visibly so: poor materials, flimsy construction, awkward designs, etc. But their other inventory isn't priced the same way, typically it's priced higher than you find elsewhere. So people who come for the cheap item but, seeing how crappy it is, go for the "next model up" pay more than they need. People who come for and buy the cheap item but end up with other impulse buys pay more than they need. People who do all their shopping at Wal-Mart because they assume the advertised pricing on the cheap subset is reflective of store-wide prices pay more than they need. Having informed customers would be terrible for their business. Sure, with their tightly integrated supply chain management they could turn a good profit even if they acted more ethically, but Wall Street looks down on executives that grow a business organically.
They don't do anything that other stores are not equally guilty of.
Independently owned stores pay better and treat their employees better than walmart.
So if I boycotted Walmart for being "evil" then I'd have to boycott all the stores, and have nowhere left to shop.
Only because Walmart has used its size to drive independent competitors out of the market.
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