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==I always wonder if they really get much value out of all this surveillance or if they just hope to get value.== The continued investment implies that the mar

==I always wonder if they really get much value out of all this surveillance or if they just hope to get value.== The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value. The largest companies in the world exist to make money and their investments exist to further that goal.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value. >Your data has value. Does it. Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates and Whole Foods already knows it's customers barely look at the prices? Backing that up with data is nice but how much value does it really have? FOMO is a big thing at the corporate management level. A million here, a million there to run pilot programs and do partial roll-outs seems like cheap insurance against getting blindsided by something you wrote off as a fad.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  ==Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates and Whole Foods already knows it's customers barely look at the prices?== If this is how you think pricing decisions are made, I don't know what to say. On the one hand, we have the lived experience of increasing surveillance and targeting, an investigative article discussing it, and long, documented history of data investments from large corporations. On the other hand, we have speculation that it's all FOMO. You don't run pilot programs and eight-year roll-outs of things you aren't taking seriously.
  - grogenaut 6y ago
    Harbor frieght sells the same shit for years at a time. Their sales are always rotating. As a customer I basically have enough info from 3 months of their ads that I have 0 fomo anymore and also I have a good idea of what the price on an item should be. So essentialy all of their targeting taught me how to maximize them. Also due to any lack of slack in their product line, I don't have anything I'm missing out on. So basically, sell me latex gloves for <$7 or I'm not coming in. Magnetic screw trays for $.99 or the bigger ones for $1.99 or not coming in. I can wait literal years for that motorcycle lift to drop to $250 instead of $475.
    - clairity 6y ago
      in other words, they've successfully segmented you and created a loyal customer, with a bonus of inventory management reliability. there's nothing wrong with that--i do it with my local grocery/big box stores too.
      - grogenaut 6y ago
        I guess that depends on how you define loyal. If I need a consumable tool I'll check there and amazon. Other than that I never go there. So loyal I guess?
        clairity 6y ago
        yes, loyal doesn't mean exclusive, just that it's on your short list, which is immensely better for a business than not being on the short list (exclusivity is an unrealstic expectation anyway).
  - MegaButts 6y ago
    I hear this all the time. "All the smart guys are spending money on it, it must be valuable!" You could use this logic to invest in real estate in 2007. Or you would've been eager to invest in WeWork had their IPO not been fucked. You would also believe self-driving cars are a good idea, but I'd bet my life savings against it knowing what I know. Don't assume you're playing the same game as them when you can't actually provide any data that what they do works. Where is the actual "X dollars of surveillance turns into Y dollars return" data points? You're just providing speculation no better than the person you're arguing with, and honestly your argument is less compelling.
    - texasbigdata 6y ago
      It’s probably more helpful to think about it at the margin: starting from some current point equilibrium for some spend $X what is the incremental lift $Y? Because that lens probably more accurately reflects a real purchase decision.
    - jxramos 6y ago
      How much is the potential of loss prevention anyways? I've seen tangible effects in store where certain products are behind glass shelves and you must get permission to purchase one and then it goes in this funky plastic box you take with you to checkout, sometimes right around the corner by the glass cage. I'm assuming theft is growing to have responses like that enacted which are incredibly inconveniencing especially when there's no affiliate nearby. Knowing I'll burn up a bunch of time waiting for one of those lockdowns to be opened I usually order online and pickup in store those items I know are locked up.
- kube-system 6y ago
  >Your data has value. > Does it. Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates Actually, that's a great example of a company that strategically prices items differently for different customers. Some of their customers are cheapskates and hit up hfqpdb.com and do the math to find the best coupon for every item they buy. Some just use the coupons in the flyer they get in the mail. Some of their customers pay the shelf price. The price essentially adjust to how cheap that particular customer is based on how much time they're willing to spend looking for coupons. Customers who don't care pay an inflated price. I would bet a large portion of their profit comes from the people in the middle -- who were lured into the store with a coupon and end up buying a bunch of other stuff at inflated prices. I could totally see them being very interested at identifying who those customers are and how to lure them into the store.
protonfish 6y ago
Having worked on customer-tracking systems for several companies and seen executive strategy first hand and compiled reports to assess the effectiveness of these types of programs I have witnessed clear evidence that what you are saying is NOT true. Yes, there could theoretically be value to this type of data but trying to explain this to VPs is pearls before swine. "They wouldn't do it if it didn't work" should be added to lists of logical fallacies. People do dumb stuff and make mistakes all the time, but groups of people are collectively about as clever as a slime mold. To assume unquestioningly the intelligence of our rulers during the Trump era is just, wow. I don't know what world you live in, but in mine, the worst people on the planet are the ones at the wheel.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  ==To assume unquestioningly the intelligence of our rulers during the Trump era is just, wow.== Who did this? I laid out the case that modern large corporations (no need to bring politics into it) are some of the most effective moneymaking machines in history. We can observe them investing heavily into customer surveillance/tracking. We can also observe the primary players in this industry thriving from a revenue and market cap perspective (Google, Facebook, Amazon). The hypothesis is that both main street (through revenues) and wall street (through outrageous P/E ratios) are signaling that the data being collected does, in fact, have value.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - protonfish 6y ago
    At first I wasn't going to reply because you are clearly not discussing in good faith (you neglected to address my evidence to the contrary or the flaw in your reasoning but instead focused on my random afterthought.) But others might read this so I decided to elaborate a bit. I was once misinformed with the belief that business' primary goal is to make money. But when you have the experience of explaining data to a CEO that clearly shows that their customer surveillance has a negative ROI and that the conclusions they are drawing from the data are not warranted. (For example, if you want to claim that your initiative increased sales, you need to compare an equivalent data point before and after the initiative, not just afterward.) If you say this and then look into the cold, dead eyes of a sociopath you'll know how foolish you were to ever assume the point of tracking customer data is to make money. I felt dumb ever believing that business leaders care directly about money. I knew that to be false in high school when they made me read 1984. The lesson that O'Brien teaches Winston is one that we clearly have not learned. > The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. We can add to that list "The object of unrelenting invasive surveillance is unrelenting invasive surveillance."
jancsika 6y ago
> The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value. That's a dangerous assumption to make, even irresponsible post-2008. It's also a fallacy which gets used by scammers often. For example, some in the spam industry relied on that fallacy to sell malvertising schemes to rubes. Because somebody must be making money off spam, right? But the scam is selling the scheme/software to enough spammers to extract a nice living before each of them predictably jumps ship. So the answer could be, "no, they aren't making money," or, "maybe, but you won't be," and the incentive to sell the systems is still there. Data may have value, but continued investment in it is certainly not enough on its own to elucidate what that value is.
mellavora 6y ago
Grocery stores can sell client data to their suppliers and use it to negotiate with suppliers. They also monetize it by sending you (supposedly) well-timed coupons. this is a huge money stream, and for retail they don't have many other options-- amazon and online delivery is eating their lunch.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value. >Your data has value. Does it. Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates and Whole Foods already knows it's customers barely look at the prices? Backing that up with data is nice but how much value does it really have? FOMO is a big thing at the corporate management level. A million here, a million there to run pilot programs and do partial roll-outs seems like cheap insurance against getting blindsided by something you wrote off as a fad.

take_a_breath 6y ago
==Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates and Whole Foods already knows it's customers barely look at the prices?== If this is how you think pricing decisions are made, I don't know what to say. On the one hand, we have the lived experience of increasing surveillance and targeting, an investigative article discussing it, and long, documented history of data investments from large corporations. On the other hand, we have speculation that it's all FOMO. You don't run pilot programs and eight-year roll-outs of things you aren't taking seriously.
- grogenaut 6y ago
  Harbor frieght sells the same shit for years at a time. Their sales are always rotating. As a customer I basically have enough info from 3 months of their ads that I have 0 fomo anymore and also I have a good idea of what the price on an item should be. So essentialy all of their targeting taught me how to maximize them. Also due to any lack of slack in their product line, I don't have anything I'm missing out on. So basically, sell me latex gloves for <$7 or I'm not coming in. Magnetic screw trays for $.99 or the bigger ones for $1.99 or not coming in. I can wait literal years for that motorcycle lift to drop to $250 instead of $475.
  - clairity 6y ago
    in other words, they've successfully segmented you and created a loyal customer, with a bonus of inventory management reliability. there's nothing wrong with that--i do it with my local grocery/big box stores too.
    - grogenaut 6y ago
      I guess that depends on how you define loyal. If I need a consumable tool I'll check there and amazon. Other than that I never go there. So loyal I guess?
      - clairity 6y ago
        yes, loyal doesn't mean exclusive, just that it's on your short list, which is immensely better for a business than not being on the short list (exclusivity is an unrealstic expectation anyway).
- MegaButts 6y ago
  I hear this all the time. "All the smart guys are spending money on it, it must be valuable!" You could use this logic to invest in real estate in 2007. Or you would've been eager to invest in WeWork had their IPO not been fucked. You would also believe self-driving cars are a good idea, but I'd bet my life savings against it knowing what I know. Don't assume you're playing the same game as them when you can't actually provide any data that what they do works. Where is the actual "X dollars of surveillance turns into Y dollars return" data points? You're just providing speculation no better than the person you're arguing with, and honestly your argument is less compelling.
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    It’s probably more helpful to think about it at the margin: starting from some current point equilibrium for some spend $X what is the incremental lift $Y? Because that lens probably more accurately reflects a real purchase decision.
  - jxramos 6y ago
    How much is the potential of loss prevention anyways? I've seen tangible effects in store where certain products are behind glass shelves and you must get permission to purchase one and then it goes in this funky plastic box you take with you to checkout, sometimes right around the corner by the glass cage. I'm assuming theft is growing to have responses like that enacted which are incredibly inconveniencing especially when there's no affiliate nearby. Knowing I'll burn up a bunch of time waiting for one of those lockdowns to be opened I usually order online and pickup in store those items I know are locked up.
kube-system 6y ago
>Your data has value. > Does it. Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates Actually, that's a great example of a company that strategically prices items differently for different customers. Some of their customers are cheapskates and hit up hfqpdb.com and do the math to find the best coupon for every item they buy. Some just use the coupons in the flyer they get in the mail. Some of their customers pay the shelf price. The price essentially adjust to how cheap that particular customer is based on how much time they're willing to spend looking for coupons. Customers who don't care pay an inflated price. I would bet a large portion of their profit comes from the people in the middle -- who were lured into the store with a coupon and end up buying a bunch of other stuff at inflated prices. I could totally see them being very interested at identifying who those customers are and how to lure them into the store.

protonfish 6y ago

Having worked on customer-tracking systems for several companies and seen executive strategy first hand and compiled reports to assess the effectiveness of these types of programs I have witnessed clear evidence that what you are saying is NOT true. Yes, there could theoretically be value to this type of data but trying to explain this to VPs is pearls before swine. "They wouldn't do it if it didn't work" should be added to lists of logical fallacies. People do dumb stuff and make mistakes all the time, but groups of people are collectively about as clever as a slime mold. To assume unquestioningly the intelligence of our rulers during the Trump era is just, wow. I don't know what world you live in, but in mine, the worst people on the planet are the ones at the wheel.

take_a_breath 6y ago
==To assume unquestioningly the intelligence of our rulers during the Trump era is just, wow.== Who did this? I laid out the case that modern large corporations (no need to bring politics into it) are some of the most effective moneymaking machines in history. We can observe them investing heavily into customer surveillance/tracking. We can also observe the primary players in this industry thriving from a revenue and market cap perspective (Google, Facebook, Amazon). The hypothesis is that both main street (through revenues) and wall street (through outrageous P/E ratios) are signaling that the data being collected does, in fact, have value.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- protonfish 6y ago
  At first I wasn't going to reply because you are clearly not discussing in good faith (you neglected to address my evidence to the contrary or the flaw in your reasoning but instead focused on my random afterthought.) But others might read this so I decided to elaborate a bit. I was once misinformed with the belief that business' primary goal is to make money. But when you have the experience of explaining data to a CEO that clearly shows that their customer surveillance has a negative ROI and that the conclusions they are drawing from the data are not warranted. (For example, if you want to claim that your initiative increased sales, you need to compare an equivalent data point before and after the initiative, not just afterward.) If you say this and then look into the cold, dead eyes of a sociopath you'll know how foolish you were to ever assume the point of tracking customer data is to make money. I felt dumb ever believing that business leaders care directly about money. I knew that to be false in high school when they made me read 1984. The lesson that O'Brien teaches Winston is one that we clearly have not learned. > The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. We can add to that list "The object of unrelenting invasive surveillance is unrelenting invasive surveillance."

jancsika 6y ago

> The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value. That's a dangerous assumption to make, even irresponsible post-2008. It's also a fallacy which gets used by scammers often. For example, some in the spam industry relied on that fallacy to sell malvertising schemes to rubes. Because somebody must be making money off spam, right? But the scam is selling the scheme/software to enough spammers to extract a nice living before each of them predictably jumps ship. So the answer could be, "no, they aren't making money," or, "maybe, but you won't be," and the incentive to sell the systems is still there. Data may have value, but continued investment in it is certainly not enough on its own to elucidate what that value is.

mellavora 6y ago

Grocery stores can sell client data to their suppliers and use it to negotiate with suppliers. They also monetize it by sending you (supposedly) well-timed coupons. this is a huge money stream, and for retail they don't have many other options-- amazon and online delivery is eating their lunch.