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Metro Future Store background… tour report… scandals… results… |
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The
METRO "Future Store"
Special Report Part 2: The Shopping Cart of the Future? Inside the Store
Inside the store we were met by our METRO guides, Dr. Gerd Wolfram, Albrecht von Truchsess, and Marcos Fernandez, who spent the next three hours showing us around. After introductions and handshakes, our hosts led us to the customer service center just inside the front door. There we picked up a computerized "Personal Shopping Assistant" -- a gadget that is a conceptual cross between a PDA, a barcode scanner, a GPS mapping device, and a laptop computer -- to snap onto our shopping cart. (Note for foreign readers: I call it a "shopping cart," while you may call it a "trolley," "basket," or "carriage.") While the device has some interesting features, here's the trouble: it won't work until a shopper identifies herself to the system by scanning the bar code on the back of her METRO Payback loyalty card.  Mr. Marcos Fernandez of METRO demontrates the Personal Shoppping Assistant attached to our grocery cart. (Note the barcode reader extending from the side of the "cart-tracker.") Pictured from left are: Albrecht von Truchsess of METRO, padeluun of FoeBuD, Rena Tangens of FoeBuD, Claudia Fischer of FoeBuD, Katherine Albrecht of CASPIAN, Marcos Fernandez of METRO, and German reporter Andreas Rosenfelder of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungu. Cart Tracker or People Tracker?  Right away, I expressed
concern that the cart records the shopper's identity from her loyalty card
(see METRO's mockup which reads "Hello,
Mrs. Weber"). I asked whether sensors in the store track the cart's location
as the shopper walks around.The answer is yes, the cart's location is continually tracked. METRO's justifies this by explaining that in order to offer location-relevant information on your screen (such as a notice that bread is on sale as you enter the bakery aisle), the system must know where the cart is at all times. But by extension, the cart knows where a shopper is at all times, too. This is worrisome, given a recent trend to use hidden devices in shopping carts to track consumers' movements in stores and later link that information to their individual purchases. (See footnote 1, below.) This device looked to me more like a people tracker than a cart tracker. But it gets worse. I learned later that efforts are apparently underway to equip the METRO cart-tracker devices with RFID readers, as well. One use envisioned for such a device would be to identify the products in a shopper's cart and use them to trigger ads around the store. "The shopping assistant tracks the shopper's movement using wireless
LAN software... - RFID Journal, July 1, 2003 RFID in Cards Never
Mentioned [1] For information about recent efforts
to link a shopper's in-store movements with her purchases, see "Tracking
grocery 'hot spots'," Portland Press Herald, 1/27/04 "PathTracker consists of small sensors attached to shopping baskets and carts that allowed the system to monitor where people went through the store. It recorded their route and timed how long they lingered in specific areas, producing printouts that look like thermal sensors....At checkout, the system married the information on where shoppers went with what they bought, giving researchers a picture of how a consumer shops and what's the end result." Continue the tour to see the item-level tagged products >>
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The Spychips website is a project of CASPIAN, Consumers
Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering.
© 2003-2006 Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre. All Rights Reserved.
Photographs © Peter Ehrentraut, FoeBuD e.V., used with permission.
