Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

First of all this is just a thought on where things are headed.   As far as I know for the moment none of the loy­alty cards I use have an RFID chip embed­ded in them.  I did sit and imag­ine what the stores could do with this infor­ma­tion.   Cur­rently the stores do take your loy­alty card infor­ma­tion and track what you pur­chase, give you tar­get­ted coupons, and cre­ate spe­cials in towns to raise sales on cer­tain objects within those towns.   We all like these cards, we all like to save a buck.   There are whole web­sites devoted to get­ting the most out of your income using loy­alty cards.   What about when they take it to the next level. 

Cur­rently com­pa­nies (such as wal­mart) have been deploy­ing RFID chips into their items to con­trol shrink­age, allow bet­ter inven­tory con­trol, and reduce stock­ing fees.   In the future I’m sure that there will be RFID sen­sors in every store shelf to allow quick notice when some­thing needs to be restocked.   Only 2 canned peaches left onthe shelf, send out a stock boy to aisle 4.   Dori­tos are being sold at a rate of 6 per 15 minute inter­val — under cur­rent con­di­tions they will need restock­ing in 38 min­utes.   This kind of tech­nol­ogy is pos­si­ble and when the price drops it will become pratical. 

So a store as RFID track­ers through out their whole store how else could they lever­age these to increase profit mar­gins?  Why track­ing the cus­tomers of course.   By know­ing what you don’t pick up, but you stop and con­sider, this could be invalu­able.   Do you always stop and look at the same item and pass it up?  Do you buy it 10% of the time?  What price point do you com­mit to the item ver­sus pass­ing it up.   Cur­rently they map opti­mum routes through the store and place sale items accord­ingly.   What if cer­tain shop­pers take non-optimum routes?  What items can we tar­get to them?   What if this is you?   How much money are you will­ing to save by giv­ing up the abil­ity for cor­po­ra­tions to inti­mately track you. 

This is just some­thing I was think­ing about and thought I would share.