As a person who mainly earns his living digitally, it is almost impossible for me to work without the Internet today, but the more we develop in the direction of an increasingly digitalized society, the more I notice the side effects, false realities of wealth, Unfulfillable demands when choosing a partner on Tindereveryone wants a job in the digital have, even if it is not needed, not to mention AI.
A few weeks ago, Heise Online published an article reporting on how the Food discounter Nettothe evolution of the shopping cart. It will no longer be unlocked with a coin or plastic clip, but with an app.
Now you might think that it would make sense, you don't need to carry coins with you (the issue of cash abolition also needs solutions for this 😉 ), I also don't have the right coin ready to take the shopping cart from time to time, although you should question the principle of coins, usually 50 cents and €1, anyway, the theft of a coin is not a problem. shopping cart is actually more lucrativeas these are sold at a much higher price.
No shopping cart without an app?
The App from Netto However, it should also act as a key for the shopping carts, of course only for those from Netto Discounter 😉
While it seems more like a gimmick than a necessity from the app side, the customer who needs a shopping cart needs to install this app and keep it permanently available. As of October 2023, the Netto app has more than 5 million downloads in the Google PlayStore.
It will probably be combined with the ability to assign the shopping cart to the user via a user account and then know how much they have bought. Everything is then networked and technically possible.
At this point I would like to quote the article from Heise Online:
Even so, a wheelchair that is not rechained is likely to be registered by the app, which could lead to sanctions on the next store visit. In general, the app-based process Fears triggeredthat Netto could use it to collect and evaluate a wide range of personal data. In principle, it would be possible to track the length of stay or shopping habits. The company could also gain an overview of how many shoppers are currently in the store.
While the monitoring of purchases is a data science story because it helps companies to determine where which products are in demand by which user and age groups (date of birth query is more than a 10 % discount 😉 ), the topic of penalties for not returning the shopping cart is already under discussion.
What could such a sanction look like? The customer could be denied access to the shopping cart if they did not log out of the shopping cart during their last purchase. Ah, data science again, you can use it to determine how long customers stay in the discount store. The longer consumers stay in the sales area, the higher the likelihood that they will buy more than they actually wanted to, I think everyone knows this somehow.
Just imagine that your child makes a stupid joke and steals a shopping cart, it's not unusual for young people to play pranks and do stupid things, you can then assign this to a user account, which shopping cart was used by which person and ended up in the river, for example. The police and insurance company will be pleased, but the person whose smartphone has been stolen will initially be in need of an explanation and, in the worst case, will have to refrain from shopping with the cart for a certain period of time.
Digital exclusion
And what about people who don't have a smartphone, will older citizens be forced to have a smartphone or how will they be able to do their shopping themselves?
What many people always forget are the older people, and that will be all of us at some point, when our mental capacity declines and we wonder what that one function on the smartphone was or what that app was called again. Will the sales staff then always
And then you're forced to have another app on your smartphone.
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