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posted by martyb on Monday May 04 2015, @07:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the turkeys dept.

I was alerted to two stories regarding grocery stores, data mining, and apps from Franz Dill at The Eponymous Pickle. First, Kroger acquired "customer science" company dunnhumbyUSA last week with the goal of boosting their "Customer 1st" strategy:

Continuing dunnhumbyUSA's work, [new subsidiary] 84.51° mines mountains of customer transactions via Kroger's loyalty card program to figure out what shoppers want.

84.51° helps Kroger to thoughtfully evaluate what products to stock, expand or discontinue. The firm's insights are also used to send coupons relevant to shoppers' habits, such as issuing pet food offers to customers who actually buy pet food.

Aitken says noted 95 percent of Kroger's growth in the last decade has come from winning more business from existing customers – which is a smarter, most cost-effective way to do business. He notes too many industries – from mobile carriers to cable TV providers – chase after new customers with one-time incentives that ultimately encourage switching, not customer loyalty.

Also, Winn-Dixie is releasing a mobile app that features:

..."personalized" digital coupons, all stored on your smartphone or other electronic device. Winn-Dixie, a subsidiary of Bi-Lo Holdings, partnered with Coupons.com for this new savings system, which sends you cyber coupons based on your own shopping preferences.

The Winn-Dixie app also features a virtual shopping list and fuelperks rewards.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 04 2015, @08:28AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 04 2015, @08:28AM (#178378) Journal

    Which idiots have failed to understand that the whole purpose of a "customer loyalty card" is to mine all the data possible from every transaction?

    YOU ARE THE PRODUCT! Maybe some of you have heard those words before?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @08:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @08:36AM (#178383)

    same as your signed in post here.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 04 2015, @08:49AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 04 2015, @08:49AM (#178388) Journal

      SN doesn't know my mailing address, my phsical location, my phone number, doesn't have access to my cell phone - nothing. SN might guess a lot of things about me, but they can't know for certain much of anything. SN has no idea what my dietary habits are, or my hygenic practices. SN can't possibly know how much gasoline I burn in a month's time, or whether I pay my bills on time.

      Signing up for loyalty rewards allows the grocer access to damned near everything there is about me. He already has my banking information. Couple that with my voluntary disclosure of my physical address, and access to my cell phone, the grocer can do all but read my mind. If my grocer's son were the creepy sort with a few hacking skills, he might know me more intimately than my wife does.

      You probably need to rethink your position on this issue - you don't seem to have any clues here.

      • (Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday May 04 2015, @09:24AM

        by wantkitteh (3362) on Monday May 04 2015, @09:24AM (#178398) Homepage Journal

        Don't forget sending that information to your payment card providers in return to access to the rest of the database. That and following your phone wifi's MAC address as you wander around the street between cloud access points. A smart, switched on store might start sending you offers by SMS if you walk past one of their stores. Who needs beacons?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @01:15PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @01:15PM (#178470)

        SN doesn't know my mailing address, my phsical location, my phone number, doesn't have access to my cell phone - nothing. SN might guess a lot of things about me, but they can't know for certain much of anything. SN has no idea what my dietary habits are, or my hygenic practices. SN can't possibly know how much gasoline I burn in a month's time, or whether I pay my bills on time.

        A few things:

        (1) I'm confident that SN is not data-mining us. Management has been pretty extreme about not participating in such schemes.

        (2) SN is nearly unique in that regard.

        (3) Data mining does not work with absolute certainty. It doesn't need to know those things with 100% accuracy. All that matters are high-confidence inferences. And much of those things can be inferred with high confidence for most people. You personally might have taken extreme countermeasures, like using Tor to mask your IP address, blocking cookies, blocking cross-site includes to trackers, paying cash for everything, never purchasing anything online, keeping your phone in airplane mode unless you are making a phone call, renting from a private landlord instead of a corporation, registering your vehicle in someone else's name, using a private mailbox for driver's license, etc.

        But all that would make you the outlier and drawing conclusions based on outliers is a way to guarantee that you get it wrong.