Shopping

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote a great piece about Costco ("where you go broke saving money") and the emotional tug-of-war going on inside our brains as we shop for what we do and don't need... and retailers' strategies for manipulating that process.

In a related article, the New York Times reveals how much info may be embedded in a coupon you pull off the Internet:

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).

Caveat emptor...