The aisles have eyes How retailers track your shopping, strip your privacy, and define your power

Joseph Turow

Book - 2017

"By one expert's prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives' drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-com...petitive generation of merchants-- including Macy's, Target, and Walmart-- is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations." --

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

658.8342/Turow
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 658.8342/Turow Checked In
Subjects
Published
New Haven : Yale University Press [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Joseph Turow (author)
Physical Description
331 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-314) and index.
ISBN
9780300212198
  • 1. A Frog Slowly Boiled
  • 2. The Discriminating Merchant
  • 3. Toward the Data-Powered Aisle
  • 4. Hunting the Mobile Shopper
  • 5. Loyalty as Bait
  • 6. Personalizing the Aisles
  • 7. What Now?
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

"Aisle be seeing you" is the new catch phrase in retailing, in which practically every move shoppers make is tracked and analyzed. Turow (Penn) writes that stores from Walmart to Macy's are putting technology to work to observe and connect with consumers throughout all stages of the shopping experience. Using everything from bar codes to rewards cards, cell phone apps, global positioning, video streams, and more, retailers have customers in their sights. Using tactics right out of a CIA covert ops play book, stores are even using facial recognition software to gauge customers' moods and readiness to buy. Turow notes that one company's software "extracts at least 90,000 data points from each frame," enabling it to determine the shopper's "anger, disgust, joy, surprise or boredom." In today's "brave new world" of retailing, whatever privacy customers may think they have is an illusion. As for telling the salesperson you're "just browsing," forget about it. With their arsenals of high-tech surveillance equipment in place, retailers are likely to know your shopping destination and intentions before you do. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. --Patricia G. Kishel, Cypress College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Concerned that consumers are being tracked digitally in physical stores as well as online, Turow (The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth) explains where, why, and how it's happening, and what the very ill effects might be. Where includes name-brand stores such as Macy's, Sears, Target, Walgreens, Walmart. Why has to do with retailers' quests for higher sales and determination to outwit their online competitors. How involves an awful lot of data mining, those ubiquitous shopper "rewards" programs, and various technologies: facial recognition, GPS tracking, Bluetooth "beacons," 3-D sensors, digital wallets, and smartphone apps that can wake themselves up and start displaying personalized promotional offers as soon as a shopper enters a store. It's all thoroughly researched and clearly presented with detailed evidence and fascinating peeks inside the retail industry. Much of this information is startling and even chilling, particularly when Turow shows how retail data-tracking can enable discrimination and societal stratification. His troubling conclusion: "This new direction in retail may be healthy for some stores' bottom lines," but it is eroding the "historical ideal of egalitarian treatment in the American marketplace." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Blame it on the smartphone, the technology that is bringing internetlike tracking and surveillance into brick-and-mortar stores.In this revealing account, Turow (Communication/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth, 2012, etc.) describes how the same online personalization made possible on your computer by cookies has reared its head in the aisles and checkouts of supermarkets and department stores, where 90 percent of all retail purchases still occur. "Tying into the always-on smartphone carried by about 70 percent of Americans," writes the author, "merchants, brand manufacturers, and their agents are exploiting cellular signals, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, sound waves, light waves, and more to track customers and send them product messages before, during, and after their store visits." This is the beginning of a "great transformation" in retailing: by 2028, half of all Americans are expected to have body implants that can communicate with retailers as they walk around stores, which will allow merchants to gather increasingly specific data on shoppers and redefine seller-customer relationships. In return for capturing datagenerally without shoppers' awarenessmerchants offer loyalty programs, discount coupons, and other benefits. In effect, they are training consumers to "give up personal data willingly," accept discriminations made between high- and low-value shoppers (with some getting better prices than others), and relinquish "the historical ideal of egalitarian treatment in the American marketplace." Turow writes in a matter-of-fact manner that barely disguises his outrage at the invasiveness of the under-the-radar surveillance at Target, Wal-Mart, and elsewhere, which, he says, demands regulation and consumer education. While sometimes repetitious, his book offers invaluable insights about in-store data-gathering, including frank observations from unnamed industry sources. Most retailers, he writes, hope future generations will simply accept surveillance and tracking as part of the American shopping experience. Valuable reading for shoppers and retailers alike. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.