Our future retail transformations are not people friendly

BY STEVEN KASZAB

Amazon is thinking outside the box while trying to place each of us in a box. Yes folks, I do not trust Amazon and also many of our retail giants.

These corporations are moving towards a type of future retailing that brand you, attach themselves to you, and follow you constantly.

Corporate apps follow you, locating you in whatever places you may be. What you are buying and looking at on the Internet. Where do you live and what is your demographic? Their multi-purpose computers scroll over all your interests and buying history. Your privacy is no longer yours. Multiple lists are bought and shared concerning all things about you, your family and neighbours. Retail has become our entertainment, socializing centre and therapist too. Stressed? Go shopping.

There is a movement that wishes to place bar codes into your flesh, where you will wave your hand and identify yourself to a retailer. Your cellular pings when you enter such establishments, and you are using your phone for your everyday life cycle. Is all this information shared with others? The technology to take this information exists, and there are no substantial laws protecting you from this manipulation. Legislators continue to ‘study” needed laws to control corporations’ growing powers of influence.

Entering a retail establishment, you can be identified through facial recognition, or simply using your debit or credit card. Will you cash out with the help of a staff member or a machine that scans barcodes? Notice there are fewer cash desks, and many more self-cash centres. You do the work, cashing yourself out while paying the full price of a product. Many staff members will continue to lose their positions to machine alternatives.

Large mall facilities will become less prevalent, and box stores less in numbers. A retail chain with over a hundred stores will divest themselves of 75% of their stores, with their payroll, store costs solely reduced. The remaining 25% of stores will act as places where clients who need to experience products can do so, and then buy it at store level or on the retailer’s website. Many retailers will place kiosks in their stores where these products can be bought on their websites along with a 10% discount.

Large corporate retailers like Wal-Mart have corporate strategies of divide and conquer. Wal-Mart will build a store, and then spend two years destroying local businesses, using extremely low prices like a hammer, squashing their smaller competition. This is the future of retail. It has proven to be a viable profitable strategy. It is all about numbers after all. We are manipulated through retail propaganda through all our media sources, radio and print also. Before you even enter a store, you have been introduced to something you have been told you really need.

Retail continues to use suppliers throughout the world who are exploitive, abusive and unlawful. Children, women and men are used to build, weave or assemble what you need. Their world can be horrible, and many people are actually controlled by these corporations. The retailer claims to buy from reliable safe sources, but who really knows.

Your privacy, self-respect, and actual needs are assaulted each day. Corporations use algorithms to understand you, categorize and manipulate you. They know how much you’re worth, where you work, what your buying history is and what your next retail purchase will probably be.

Corporate retail is becoming the new feudal lord. It lends to you, sells to you, uses propaganda against you and then rifles your pocketbook too.

Democracy has many enemies, but corporate retail greed is found at the top of the scale.