Wally World is watching you

I've been sick for the last couple of days. Hard to say if it's a cold or just allergies and I'm extraordinarily cranky so I'm in the mood to bitch about stuff. Take this for instance. Another reason not to shop at Wally World. They're going to start tracking you throughout your shopping experience. The RFID tags apparently aren't enough for them.

"There are big gaps in the understanding of what drives [customers] to make their decision," he said. "Prism can be a major determinant of store lay-outs." The system uses infra-red beams to track shoppers' movements and correlate them with actual sales data, producing what its proponents claim is the first scientific metric for the effectiveness of in-store sales tools such as shelf location and promotional displays.

Worse yet, if the system is a success, before you know it all the big boxes will be doing it. Then ten years from now, they'll figure out all that infra-red bombarment is giving us brain tumors or something. And people wonder why I don't like shopping and go to little local stores when forced to buy something.

Update: Kathy at Stone Soup checks into comments with a brilliant suggestion.

I don't shop at WalMart either, but I have a devious idea. I implore all Big Box activists to drop into WalMart, aimlessly wander the aisles, pick stuff up and then put it down again, and aimlessly wander somewhere else. It will drive the data analysts nuts trying to figure out what it all means!

I love it. Of course that's the way I shop anyway when I'm forced to go to one of those places. I can never find what I'm looking for. They're always so bloody big and they're never organized in a logical manner.