There’s an interesting development in brick and mortar shopping with this interactive shopping cart console that’s being trialed:
Customers with a ShopRite loyalty card will be able to log into a Web site at home and type in their grocery lists; when they get to the store and swipe their card on the MediaCart console, the list will appear. As shoppers scan their items and place them in their cart, the console gives a running price tally and checks items off the shopping list.
I like this. It’s overkill if you just run to the store because you ran out of milk but for any real shopping trip this would be really useful–if the web experience is any good. Might be even better if we had shelves and refrigerators that could use RFID or something on the food packages and automatically keep a running shopping list for you. You could run to the store sometime just because you were nearby, knowing that the shopping cart would tell you what you were currently out of. So far, so good.
The system also uses radio-frequency identification to sense where the shopper’s cart is in the store. The RFID data can help ShopRite and food makers understand shopping patterns, and the technology can also be used to send certain advertisements to people at certain points — an ad for 50 cents off Oreos, for example, when a shopper enters the cookie aisle. Microsoft said it is still working on how it will present commercials and coupons.
Microsoft is also working with MediaCart and ShopRite to help advertisers reach potential consumers based on past grocery purchases, which are logged when they swipe their loyalty cards.
OK, so now we’re in Minority Report land, where the wall ads were changing for each person who walked by and the ads knew you by name. Ads on your shopping cart console are less intrusive than that but it still brings up some privacy concerns. That said, I suppose it saves paper to have digital ads instead of putting them in the local newspapers, in mailouts, and in paper coupons at the store. More importantly, the most important privacy concerns are pretty obvious to those involved –
Advertisers will get more feedback about which commercials or coupon offers are effective, because customers either buy the products or accept the offers on the spot, or they don’t. But Ferris said neither Microsoft nor any advertisers will have access to the personal information consumers provide when they join the supermarket’s loyalty card program.