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Comment by hamburgerwah | Hacker News Reader

One other thing people may not realize. If you use your credit card at a merchant online or in person and you associate any information such as a telephone number or email with that card. Any time you use that card, online or off, to make a purchase with that merchant those transactions can be tied together regardless of whether you provide your email/phone on future transactions. Large vendors such as walmart etc now associate that phone/email and card(s) with your facial recognition information. The second you walk into the store based on your face they can pull up your entire purchase history and contact. They are now crunching that data to improve retail layouts, marketing pitches, etc and there is growing market of selling aggregates of that data across merchants.

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Then why does it take the sales person at Macy's 15 minutes to look up my order before giving up and just giving me a refund for a poorly fitting sweater I brought back?

Customer support is a cost center, so it gets less funding than sales/marketing-oriented projects

(route-optimizing here likely has the intention of boosting sales, not necessarily reducing customer shopping time)

Yes. There’s a reason some of the most often needed groceries are almost always at the back of a supermarket.

Yes, because that's where the refrigerated warehouse is usually located: in the back of the store, to make it easier and cheaper to restock shelves from behind. By comparison, at least in the US, green groceries are almost never in the back of the store.

I don't understand "cost center". Everything is a cost center except the part where you physically acquire the money. Surely both marketing and customer service are invested money that hopefully increases your customer base down the line? What's the difference?

I suspect the real reason that the panopticon is kept separate from the customer is to avoid creeping people out.

For Macy's, the 15 minutes you were forced to spend inside the store is a feature, not a bug.

That makes sense! It also takes several minutes just to get someone's attention at the makeup counter or to find a sales person to sell me a bath towel.

Is it? That's 15 minutes of a customer not spending money, and 15 minutes of a staff person dedicated to giving back money to a customer, rather than generating more revenue.

I get that its considered a feature to get them into a store, but surely you don't want to optimise for associates not selling things?

Well, making returns painful leads to less returns, to a certain logic. But it surely also leads to less sales, so I'm not sure which effect is greater.

>Is it? That's 15 minutes of a customer not spending money, and 15 minutes of a staff person dedicated to giving back money to a customer, rather than generating more revenue.

That would be true if the customer service area was isolated inside an empty boring room, but at Macy's, it's out in the open on the store floor and surrounded by merchandise. Waiting in a boring line means eyes that wander to adjacent displays and stands.

WAI. They recognized you, and wanted to you spend more time in the store. /s

Because Macy's is a dinosaur living in its last days.

I think the ultimate cause of this kind of inconsistency is that the panopticon-style correlation of customer data is happening offline in a business intelligence system that has a one-way, stale data feed from various ETLs, while making a return happens in an online system that doesn't get anything back from the analytics system (because the analytics data is too loosely structured and low-quality to feed it back into a line of business system).

This kind of dichotomy exists in just about any organization that gets into BI/data science/whatever you want to call it, and it can be absolutely maddening. The state of ETLs and analytics systems, for example, means that we have basically gone back to "overnight batch processing" and a lot of reporting data only becomes available the day after the transaction, since all the ETLs need to run and then whatever analytics system, data-cube assembly or etc. But since the analytics system exists, it is taken as good enough and no one wants to re-implement the functionality in an online, system-of-record fashion.

Or another way to put it: the GP says "The second you walk into the store based on your face they can pull up your entire purchase history and contact." That's being pretty generous... most of the time they don't know any of that until an hour or a day later, because it comes from multiple disparate systems (and outside vendors) and importing that data into a data warehouse (in batches) and then correlating it later is far easier to implement, and the dominant method used in this kind of analytics.

Why improve the service when you make purchases anyway? No unnecessary optimizations. Aggregated data is valuable and it is sold to any other industry. Helps with the slim margins of retail. They also get more pictures of you.

Because Macy’s may be going out of business like JC Penny’s and Dillards.

> The second you walk into the store based on your face they can pull up your entire purchase history and contact. They are now crunching that data to improve retail layouts, marketing pitches, etc and there is growing market of selling aggregates of that data across merchants.

Super interesting, is there public information about this? Are you are saying they are using customer identity for sample weighting to debias and improve the precision of experiments?

okay... i'll bite: how does one use a card online without providing phone or email?

you can't

I don't know if this actually makes things better or worse - I do it in the hope I can shut down spam by removing a compromised address - but I try very hard to use a different email address for every business I purchase from.

You don't always have to provide a phone number, either. Most of the time yes, but I don't think the phone number is actually required to complete a credit card transaction.

There also used to be credit providers - maybe there still are? - that would let you generate a new card number for each purchase. That too may accomplish nothing from a tracking perspective, since the credit provider would be able to match up all the numbers. But, if I had that capability, I would use it.

I have once had a phone call about an online purchase telling me I had to pay extra taxes for the import.

There's this one:

https://privacy.com

Apple Card does as well (and Apple Pay in general with any other card).

Bank of America stopped doing virtual credit card numbers a few years ago.

I think Citibank allows you to do it, but I have no personal experience or knowledge.

I have a card from Capital One that allows virtual credit card numbers.

Privacy.com is a service specifically for this issue. It allows you to generate lots of virtual cards and even use fake names so you can't be tracked so easily.

There are credit card services that provide some privacy, such as proxies: I've heard of Abine, Privacy, and something called Final, but I haven't looked into them.

I try to use Offset credit when possible - yet only with nerd friends

Obviously you can't but the point people don't realize is that if you use that same card in store the merchant can link it back to online purchases you made and all your information which they can then package and sell to data brokers.

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