Costco is building out an ad business using its shoppers' data
marketingbrew.com
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With the exception of certain times (e.g. Christmas) or certain books (e.g. Spare), they don't sell enough of any given book to have a pallet in the store for that book.
Mixing items/books on a pallet is a dumb idea. With single product pallets, you replace the pallet once its empty with another pallet. If you have two items in a pallet with one sold out and another barely sold any, what do you do?
I wonder why this gets disabled? Is this a rule in some obscure security ruleset?
And this is a brand-new form... So someone recently came up with it.
lol: This site is protected by reCAPTCHA.
reCAPTCHA is awful. This is my experience on a daily basis if I make the mistake of trying to use it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_TsZB3zQFQ
It's often only possible to complete with the accessibility feature or the Buster add-on.
I am stupefied to find out Costco is this late to this party. I don't even like the party, but it makes me worry about their leadership's awareness of...the entire world? Without some principled reason not to have done this sooner, it's just an awfully big ball to have dropped.
I may be misremembering but iirc during a call with investors they were asked why they hadn’t been raising prices like everyone else is and the response was basically “because we don’t need to, so we won’t screw people over just because we can”.
Meanwhile Costco's entire business is based around negotiating a large profit cut for name brands, and letting the consumer in on a tiny percentage of that profit cut. For most things, Costco isn't even that significant a discount anymore.
There's the famous story of the Founder in a meeting supposedly telling the CEO "If you increase the price of the hot dog I will fucking kill you"
If this actually happened, it's because the CEO knows that the $1.50 the hotdog costs is essential to the brand, and not because he has any belief about how much a hotdog should cost.
Maybe selling user data to third parties is a short term profits at the expense of long term strategy?
Granted, they probably don't care at all about my opinion, and they shouldn't, given that I'm one random person who doesn't live near a Costco and doesn't have the space to store bulk purchases for one even if I did. I just think making this choice now reflects badly on them either way.
Sell your customer data, and you give your suppliers and competitors your insider info and competitive advantage.
I would assume whatever they are building is focused on protecting their customer info, not based on principle but simply on… that’s their treasure trove.
But if that's the case, then I'm looking down on them for throwing that away in favor of short-term gain now.
Unless they can point to something specific and say, "Our reason was X. Now Y has happened, which makes X now an inferior strategy to Z, so we're doing Z now," they either should have done it sooner or shouldn't do it now. I don't see anywhere they're pointing at any Y that has happened.
What am I missing?
I think there's a lot of labeling that could happen from the data, and thats what advertisers want more of right?
But overall, meat, lettuce, etc comes from Costco.
* this is proxy grumbling about codecov.io ads appearing everywhere for a couple days every time I visit the site...but I've been a paid subscriber for 6 months
It's great because it's also not affected by ATT, since it's all 1st party.
> The founder of Costco told a CEO who wanted to raise the prices on Costco's hot dogs: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out."
They recently upgraded it too (leaky plastic container -> sealed bag).
The next generation never understands the wars that have been fought for them.
The burps afterwards are pretty gross, though, haha. But I haven't found a hot dog that has less gross burps. It's the cost of doing business, especially at Costco.
Except those apple chicken dog things, but they are not a proper hotdog.
AFAICT their Android app is just an awfully implemented webview, I can't change the email address associated with the account, they can't link purchases made with my card in-store to those on the website, the list goes on.
https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/answer_view/a...
That's not been very effective in tech recently, has it?
People have control over whether they enable the surveillance capitalism grift when they are used as means to an end. They can make this business model proliferate much less, so that much fewer companies are built around it, and other business decisions are relatively more profitable. We can all not use apps that track us, clear our cookies automatically when the browser closes, use E2E encryption in communications, and so on. And yes, many people can also not shop at Costco. And many will make that choice, but not most.
You know, society has always managed to enforce the social order without the need for government — to decide together what is acceptable and what crosses boundaries. For at least tens of thousands of years as pre-chieftain egalitarian communities, and ever since. Culture exists as a concept, people can develop a privacy-conscious culture and in some regions of the world, it exists more than in others. Government as a concept is more recent. Big micromanaging government, even more recent.
You just need to not be lazy and do the work, not expect that someone else will come and solve all the problems for you. Of course, people have become quite complacent these days. They don't set boundaries if it's more convenient for them in the moment. But culture is more effective than government in dictating what is right and wrong, except for autocracies. Some have been very effective in imposing a social order. But I don't think we need to go there. People can self-manage. The question if whether people want to self-manage or if they prefer the consequences of not doing so.
For example, the culture of data privacy exists in some European countries more than in the US. Laws like GDPR are a result of this culture, they are not dictatorial imperatives going against what people want and practice in their lives.
The people usually set the norms. The law only enshrines them.
Yes, I agree with naturally arising collective action through culture. I argue that this may be all we need and we can do just fine without government intervention. I don’t think government intervention can be as robust as cultural norms, anyways. Tech companies constantly find ways to dance around laws. They can’t dance around their primary source of income choosing not to be exploited.
And this doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. As more people will value privacy, a culture will develop that will reduce exploitative business practices like surveillance capitalism. If fewer people will value privacy, a culture will develop that will enable their exploitation. It’s gradients.
Edit: For example, in order to opt out without a membership you need to provide your street address.
> If Costco passes this revenue down to consumers
If they explicitly offered to pay people cash to track them, uptake would be nowhere near 100%. And this isn’t even as good as that, since as you say the payment would only be in the form of coupons which may or may not materialize.
actually most people DO care, but businesses purposefully have added enough friction so that the common person gives up.
The general consumer will note that Costco wants their money.