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Website analytics for malls is a good analogy. Five years from now, people will clap technology on the back for giving them more efficient store placements beca
by FreshCode 15y ago
Website analytics for malls is a good analogy. Five years from now, people will clap technology on the back for giving them more efficient store placements because of "mall analytics", but in the present, people are constantly fighting the future.
The negative reactions even remind me of The Oatmeal's comic on every time Facebook changes its layout: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout
- feralchimp 15y ago>Five years from now, people will clap technology on the back for giving them more efficient store placements because of "mall analytics" If there were a way to bet money against that statement, I'd be doing it. Honestly, have you been to a mall lately? Did it give off a "trying our best to make shopping less of a bitch" vibe to you? Web analytics can create value for the consumer because a website can morph to fit the user. Earth malls do not have that option. And to the extent that this data will be used to inform store placement at all (maybe for new malls; probably just sold to stores in existing malls), it may actually be in the mall's best interest to move popular stores further apart. That way, you're forced to pass shops for which you have no prior expressed interest. Probably Cinnabon. Win?
- rcthompson 15y agoYes, malls already make the bathrooms and food hard to find because they know that everybody needs those, and making you search for them increases your chance of buying something on the way. If the malls knew which "store transitions" were most popular, they would definitely try to maximize their length. Simple objective function for the mall: maximize the sum over all paths of the path length times the number of people who took that path.