BudNet Tracks Your Suds 712
An anonymous reader writes "CNN is carrying a story about Budweiser's national internal sales tracking network called BudNET. It allows Anheuser-Busch to instantly track sales across the country, and 'If Anheuser-Busch loses shelf space in a store in Clarksville, Tennessee, they know it right away.' It brings up some interesting privacy issues, because according to the article 'The last time you bought a six-pack of Bud Light at the Piggly Wiggly, Anheuser servers most likely recorded what you paid, when that beer was brewed, whether you purchased it warm or chilled, and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.' Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands."
Give me an Arrogant Bastard Ale any day.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, how? (Score:3, Interesting)
what you paid,
Okay, this part is reasonable
when that beer was brewed,
I can see that they might be able to guess at this with a fair degree of certainty, but how do they know I didn't somehow get a 6-pack that's been sitting at the back of the shelf for weeks? Sure, it's got a "born on" date printed on it, but that's not part of the UPC, so how are they getting it?
whether you purchased it warm or chilled,
Again, same thing: it's the same UPC; how would it know, other than in aggregate (i.e. the distributor writing down how many 6-packs are in the cooler when he gets there.) And even if it knows in aggregate, how does it know that the guy at the liquor store didn't move a bunch of warm Buds back into the cooler when the distributor's rep wasn't there?
and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.Okay, this one's obvious, too.
Re:Piggly-Wiggly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Piggly-Wiggly's success led to a number of copycat chains, quite a few of which decided to also copy the astoundingly dumb naming convention in addition to the whole self-serve thing.
Re:Piggly-Wiggly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply amazing.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Simply amazing... more concerned about getting drunk than watching movies...
tinfoil hats (Score:2, Interesting)
They have no idea who purchased their beer, they're not keeping your personal buyig habits ina massive database to use against you when you run for president. They're just trying to make sure that everytime you walk into your local store, they don't lose business because you want one of their products which is currently out of stock.
AB makes a product here in Texas called Ziegen Bock, not my personal favorite, but I know people who like it. It's primary competitor is Shiner Bock. Now I'm sure the AB people want to make sure that they don't run into cases where Shiner is in the store and not Ziegen. This benefits my friends as they also want to make sure that Ziegen is there so they don't have to get back in their cars and go to the next store down the road. Oh look, incentive for the stores to help AB in this data collection.
I see a win-win-win situation here, not a threat to my personal privacy.
Nothing to see here... (Score:4, Interesting)
A big problem in the beverage industry is 'out-of-stocks'. Most retailers use direct-store-delivery for beverages [bottlers put the stuff on trucks and tell the truck - sometimes in transit - where and how much to drop off at each store]. Before scanners, it could be days before an out-of-stock product was identified. Think about how much product moves off a shelf - per day, per store, per market - having no product on the shelf adds up quick.
The dollars manufacturers can lose due to out-of-stocks is huge. And retailers don't want empty space, and they don't want shoppers not finding their favorite product and going somewhere else. The manufacturer who figures out how to keep their merchandise in-stock efficiently will be a favorite of the retailer, especially if they are a big name like Bud, who also advertises a lot.
Companies like Bud use market research to determine the mix of products. Markets that have a higher Hispanic population may have a higher mix of beverages that cater to this group. But they don't know that 'you' specifically bought their product.
Nothing to see here...unless you're overly paranoid [but no one on
Re:Just pay with cash (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Use somebody else's card. When you get one of those cards, they give you a couple copies. Friends will often just give them to you.
2. Get one online. Seriously. I don't have the time to find a link, but there was that guy campaigning to make himself the #1 consumer of some grocery chain by giving away stickers with his barcode on them.
Personally, I hate the things too (it's just such an obvious excuse to raise prices and track purchases), but don't have too much problem when the local store thinks it's my girlfriend who's loading up on beer.
Re:Wow you're right! (Score:5, Interesting)
I do think it's snotty to crap on them because they're big and commercial, and I think you're all a bunch of god damn yuppies and beer snobs. No offense.
Re:Quite frankly... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd much, much rather have a nice big glass of Hoegaarden [bottledbeer.co.uk] or Celis White [bottledbeer.co.uk]...
This is a no-brainer..... (Score:2, Interesting)
The reality is that as long as companies get a free pass on violating our rights, we will continue to lose them.
Re:Quite frankly... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'd be more concerned . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
This has some interesting effects
1. The college students can get drunk on a couple bucks
2. College students acquire a taste for A-B
3. Later in life college students pay a profitable rate on these products
4. A-B sells a bajillion barrels of beer a year
Looks a little like pushing a drug doesn't it? First hit is free, you pay for it the rest of your life
Re:Since when... (Score:2, Interesting)
Old hat (Score:2, Interesting)
The salesmen filled mark-sense cards, which were sent to a contractor who gave back weekly reports (on reams of computer paper).
We wanted to bring this back in-house. Naturally, we thought of using a portable computer for this. Of course, 25 years ago, nothing would do, so we brewed our own, based on a Motorola 8 bit chip.
Trouble is, the thing was so big that we had to hide it in a book...
Alas, as usual, politics canned the whole project, and we simply managed to buy a mark-sense reader to read the sheets in-house...
Re:Piggly-Wiggly? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow you're right! (Score:2, Interesting)
Another beer that has a bad rap is Schlitz. I guess because a case of beer is under $10, it has to taste like crap. Well, i could sell you a case of Schlitz for $20 if you really want me to. There are plenty of beers above the $16 mark that i absolutely deplore. I will refrain from listing them.
Our new macrobrew overlords (Score:2, Interesting)
The gourmet coffee craze has changed the coffee industry. It's not just monocled Bentley owners who choose a $3 cup of gourmet aribica over a 30 cup of Folgers today. I see plenty of constuction workers at my local Starbucks. The same thing is happening to beer. My local grocery store now carries a $20 per bottle Belgian beer.
Don't worry about Bud, it's the club cards (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe this person was a scammer, but it bugs me knowing that they track every item that I buy.
Re:Just pay with cash (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Demographic data mining isn't bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
There's an even easier reason why they don't start doing this...drivers would simply start paying at the tolls instead of using the convenience of the scanners...which the
I would be more concerned what someone finds out when you buy that car (most require a credit check) than the fact that your EZ-PASS can "snitch" on you...
Of course, the big one that concerns me is On-Star. They keep running commercials with people being helped by the On-Star reps, but have you seen the one where the guy locks his keys in the car and the rep unlocks the door...what keeps someone from spoofing the signal or better yet, hooking up with an On-Star rep to unlock a car and steal it...
A few comments on anonymity (Score:3, Interesting)
What you say is correct. But also, in times past, there wasn't the ability to store information as there is today. Sure, records were kept (and I'm grateful, I've used store records several hundreds of years old in genealogy research - it is fun to see what your ancestors bought), but they were handwritten, on paper likely a little more dear in value than paper is today. So not everything got written down. Which is why genealogical research can't go back beyond several hundred years geneally, maybe to 1066 for English ancestors. It was simply too expensive, too unimportant, or too troublesome, for records to be kept on daily activities, unless you descend from somebody famous or wealthy. So my first point is
(1) The cost of keeping records, not only financially, but in busywork, meant that much less was tracked.
Additionally, as you point out, customers likely knew the shopkeeper personally, and very well at that. It was the nature of the infrastructure of the day. For most people, it is likely that noone knew about them outside of a radius of 10 miles or so (except family/freinds from places they migrated from, naturally) - there simply was no reason to benefit to knowing this. Thus,
(2) any use made of a person's personal information would be likely known to the person, or at least, the person would be local to the perpetrator and could more easily see the results of the use. There simply was not the chance of long-distance identity theft such as is so well documented with our present infrastructure.
Additionally,
(3) With surveillance cameras and recording of their signals, etc., there is alot of records being made of aspects of our life which, while publically available in the past, were not recorded. Thus our actions, while public, had a certain nonpermanence about them which is rapidly eroding away.
I have a freind who is very concerned about this last point. He has come up with a doctrine he thinks should be incorporated into our jurisprudence - the doctrine of forgettability. He argues that while our actions in public have no legal "expectation of privacy", we did have a de facto situation where our actions were forgotten as they were not permanently recorded. Surveillance cameras, ATM and credit card transaction recordings, and on and on mean that our behavior is recorded whereas it would have been 'forgotten' in times past.
As a last point, (4) increased permanence of records
The last point is debatable, perhaps, as computer records are more easily deleted, too. There is likely a ton of information recorded and later deleted. But with backups, redundency, etc. I bet many of our records last longer than records of the past.
Overall, our records are more detailed than at any point in history, more accessible to 3rd parties than at any time in history, more accessible from long distances, and, likely, more permanent than ever before.
We may have not had anonymity before, but the lack of anonymity was localized. Localized in time, localized in space, and what information did last through time or was available to 3rd parties or parties at long distances away was much, much less than what is available to such parties today.
The week after 911, we had a discussion in a class, one of my colleagues/costudents stated he thought we are now in an era where privacy will have to be thrown out for the public good, an age of non-privacy, if you will.
Is he right? Seems we are well on the road in that direction.
Re:Credit card fees (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A public DARE!! (Score:1, Interesting)
We don't want drunks in our schools. Or in our government. Or in our church. You are likely to be providing alcohol with minors. Please come down to the station for some questioning. You're more likely than a teetotaller to be a drunk driver so we're raising your rates.
And even if YOU don't fit in any of those categories, surely you're not so devoid of the milk of human kindness that you'd wish ill on those who ARE in thos categories.
To answer your question directly:
The worst thing that can result from data about you being made publicly available is that the government will feed that public data into their anti-terrorist algorithms and determine that you may be a terrorist. Until false positives are eliminated, the only cure is total privacy protection.
it's crappy by european standards, sure (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not personally a fan of Bud, but I think most of the people crapping on it in this thread are doing so out of simple elitism. Most likely prefer beers that have been marketed to them as "sophisticated" like the hopped-to-hell-and-back Heineken, or, god forbid, Amstel, which seems to trade entirely on a fake European heritage to excuse the fact that it tastes like licking a skunk.
Re:I went to Budweiser Beer School (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A public DARE!! (Score:2, Interesting)
... supermarket cards. Some years back, there were a couple of interesting cases.
In one, part of the evidence cops used to convict a crack pusher was his grocery card, which documented insane amounts of baggie purchases.
In another, some geezer slipped in the aisle in Von's. When they gave him grief about compensation, he threatened a lawsuit. They, in turn, threatened to enter into evidence records of every fifth of Jim Beam he'd ever purchased there, even though he was dead sober when the fall occurred. Fortunately the story got out and there was sufficient public outrage to get the store to back off.
Some years back, I lost track of the Safeway card. Neither of my phone numbers would call it up. Instead of asking for a new app, the clerk picked one out of a drawer, swiped it and gave it to me. I've used it ever since. I have no idea who gets the credit for the accumulated purchases, but I no longer get any mailings from them at home. Maybe it's a scam where she has them made out to her family members. If so, good thing -- anything to mess up Safeway.
Re:Wow you're right! (Score:4, Interesting)
Microbrewing has brought about an American beer renaissance in which other styles of beer are being made again and sold at tolerably reasonable prices, though it still costs three or four times as much to drink good beer as crappy beer.
Huh? Don't they have a right to track inventory? (Score:3, Interesting)
um, why not? Don't they have a right to know what people are paying for their beer, or where it's purchased from? That's incredibly valueable information to determine where advertising dollars should go, if prices are competitive, what types of beer customers prefer, and a long list of other factors I couldn't even dream of. If anything this is a very good thing as it can only help Anheuser determine what to do to get you to purchase there products by giving you what you want, and to figure out what you want they must first determine if you like your beer warm or chilled, etc.
(Yawn) Wake Me When Cocaine Purchases Are Tracked (Score:3, Interesting)
When they figure out how to track which of my ATM withdrawals are going to weed, cocaine, mushrooms, acid, or other such fun enhancers, then I'll be concerned.
Budweiser knowing how their stock is flowing concerns me not.