Olivia: Jackson, I've got a fun one for you. What do you think is the most valuable piece of real estate in a supermarket? Jackson: Uh, the checkout counter? Or maybe the end-cap with all the impulse-buy candy? That’s where they always get me. Olivia: Close, but no. It's the digital space inside your phone. And retailers are in a full-blown war to conquer it. Jackson: A war for my phone? That sounds a little dramatic for grocery shopping. I’m just trying to remember to buy milk. Olivia: It sounds dramatic, but it's the central argument in Joseph Turow's incredibly eye-opening book, The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power. And Turow isn't some conspiracy theorist; he's a leading professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent decades researching marketing and privacy. He literally wrote the book on how we're being tracked. Jackson: Okay, so this is coming from a place of deep academic research. I'm listening. It’s not just a hunch. Olivia: Not at all. And the book was widely seen as a deeply unsettling eye-opener for a lot of readers. Because the strategy retailers are using is something they openly call the 'frog in boiling water' approach. Jackson: Hold on, the 'frog in boiling water'? You mean the old story where the frog doesn't notice it's being cooked because the temperature rises so slowly? Olivia: That’s the one. And it’s not just an analogy I’m making. Turow opens the book with a true story that will make your skin crawl.

Jackson: I’m ready. Lay it on me. Olivia: It’s August 2015. A marketing conference in Manhattan called 'The Internet of Things: Shopping'. A vice president of a large interactive agency gets up on stage. He’s talking about how to get shoppers to accept new in-store surveillance, like beacons that track your every move. And he says, to this room full of marketers, that the best approach is the frog in boiling water. Introduce the surveillance slowly, bit by bit, so people just get used to it. Jackson: No way. He actually said that out loud? In front of people? That sounds like something from a dystopian movie, not a business conference. Olivia: He did. And it gets worse. Later at the same conference, another expert predicts that by 2028, half of all Americans will have device implants that communicate directly with retailers, monitoring their biometrics as they shop. Jackson: Device implants? Like, in our bodies? And what was the reaction in the room? Surely people were horrified. Olivia: That's the most chilling part. Turow reports there was zero objection. No one questioned the ethics. It was just accepted as the future of retail. The water is getting warmer, and the industry is turning up the heat. Jackson: Wow. Okay, so how does this actually work in practice? I mean, my phone doesn’t feel like it’s spying on me when I’m at Target. Olivia: That’s the genius of it. It’s designed to feel like magic, not surveillance. Turow lays out a few scenarios. Imagine you're a high-value customer at an upscale department store. The moment you walk in, your phone signals your arrival. A sales associate’s tablet lights up with your photo, your online browsing history, what you almost bought last time. A computer even predicts what you’ll buy today and suggests matching accessories. At checkout, you get a surprise 20% discount. You feel seen, special, rewarded. Jackson: That sounds… actually kind of amazing. I wouldn’t mind being that person. Olivia: Exactly! Who wouldn't? Or take a supermarket. You open the store's app. It knows your shopping history, your loyalty score, and it’s even bought data about your income level. As you walk down the aisles, it sends you personalized coupons and recipes. The system is calibrated to give you just enough of a discount to make you feel good, while also nudging you to spend about 10 percent more than you did last time. Jackson: That is sneaky. It's not just helping me, it's actively trying to get more money out of me under the guise of a deal. Olivia: Precisely. And it goes even further. A big-box store might use your social media data, your Facebook likes, to calculate an 'influence score' and tailor your discounts based on that. You use their app to scan items, bypass the checkout, and their computer cross-references your cart with your purchase history to make sure you haven't stolen anything. Jackson: This all sounds great if you're the VIP getting 20% off. What's the catch? What happens if you're not the 'right' kind of customer? Olivia: Ah, and that is the dark side of all this personalization. Turow calls it what it is: retail discrimination. Let's flip those scenarios. You’re a loyalty member at that same upscale store, but you only ever buy things on the sale rack. The store’s computer knows this. It flags you as a low-value customer. This time, when you walk in, no one greets you. You watch other people getting those 20% discounts, but you get nothing. You leave feeling envious and unwelcome. Jackson: So your loyalty is actually punished because you're not spending enough. That feels like a total betrayal. Olivia: It is. Or imagine you're a lower-income shopper. The coupons you get are for expensive brands you'd never buy. You see other shoppers at the chain supermarket getting amazing deals on their phones, but the system doesn't know enough about you to give you the good stuff. You feel excluded. Or, in the most extreme case, you walk into a convenience store that uses facial recognition. The system scans your face, checks it against a criminal database, and because you have a minor offense from ten years ago, the clerk is told to watch you. You're followed, treated with suspicion, and humiliated. Jackson: That's horrifying. So the same technology that creates a VIP experience for one person creates a hostile, discriminatory environment for another. Olivia: Exactly. It's a system designed to sort us into winners and losers before we even reach for our wallets. And we're being taught to accept it as normal.

Jackson: So this discrimination isn't an accident, it's the goal. It feels so… un-American. I always thought stores were supposed to be these great equalizing spaces. Olivia: That's the great myth! Turow calls it the 'hidden curriculum' of retail. We've been taught to believe in the egalitarian ideal of the department store, but the reality is much more complicated. To understand today, we have to look back. Jackson: What do you mean by a 'hidden curriculum' in a supermarket? I get it for school, where you learn social rules, but for shopping? Olivia: The hidden curriculum is what an institution teaches you without ever saying it out loud. In retail, we've been taught for a century that shopping should be fair and democratic. Turow tells this amazing story about a woman named Christine Frederick, a household efficiency expert, who testified before the U.S. Congress way back in 1910. Jackson: Testifying about what? Olivia: About the evils of bargaining! Back then, in many small stores, there were no fixed prices. The price depended on who you were. Frederick recounted how she used to have to "Jew him down," using the prejudiced language of the time, just to get a fair price. She argued this system was dishonest and inefficient. The heroes of her story were the new, grand department stores. Jackson: Because they had the 'one price plan,' right? Everyone pays the same. Olivia: Exactly. Places like Macy's and Wanamaker's promoted a democratic ideal. Fixed prices, money-back guarantees, letting anyone come in and touch the merchandise. It was a revolution. It felt clean, honest, and equal. Jackson: So the fixed-price department store was the 'good guy' fighting the prejudiced old-world bargaining? Olivia: On the surface, yes. It was a huge step forward. But Turow points out that even then, discrimination was baked in. Department stores had the affluent 'carriage trade' who got premium service and the 'mass' trade who didn't. Supermarkets that opened in poorer neighborhoods often had lower-quality goods and higher prices than the ones in the suburbs. The ideal of equality was powerful, but the practice was often very different. Jackson: Huh. So the dream was never fully the reality. But how did we get from that to the intense, individual tracking we have today? There’s a huge leap between a store having a 'carriage trade' section and it knowing my personal influence score. Olivia: The leap was made possible by one of the most boring, everyday objects you can imagine: the barcode. Jackson: The barcode? The little black and white lines? How? Olivia: Think about it. Before the 1970s, a retailer knew they sold, say, 100 cans of soup in a day. But they had no easy way of knowing who bought them, or what else they bought. Cash was anonymous. Then, on June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio, the first item with a Universal Product Code, or UPC, was scanned. It was a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. Jackson: A historic moment for chewing gum. Olivia: And for surveillance! Suddenly, retailers could track every single item in real-time. It was a firehose of data. It shifted the balance of power from the product manufacturers to the big retailers like Walmart. But most importantly, it laid the technological foundation. Once they could track the product, the next logical step was to connect the product to the person. The loyalty card was the first bridge. The smartphone app is the superhighway. The barcode was the Trojan Horse that let data-driven tracking into the store.

Jackson: So we've come full circle. We went from a personalized, often prejudiced, haggling session with a peddler who knew your family, to the supposedly 'democratic' one-price store, and now we're right back to a high-tech version of that peddler who knows everything about us and gives us a personalized, and potentially discriminatory, price. Olivia: Exactly. And Turow's most chilling point is that we're being taught to prefer this. The 'hidden curriculum' today is that giving up your data is normal, even smart. We are being trained to see surveillance as a service. Jackson: It’s a feature, not a bug. They make it feel like a game, with points and rewards and personalized offers. You feel like you're winning. Olivia: You feel like you're winning, but the house always has the edge. And the definition of loyalty itself is being twisted. It's no longer about the store being loyal to you. It's about you being predictable enough for them to maximize their profit from you. Jackson: What do you mean? Olivia: Turow quotes a marketing consultant who lays it out cold. He says marketers are learning to figure out which customers really need a promotion and which don't. And then he asks the killer question: "If they are already a loyal customer, why would you charge them less?" Jackson: Wow. That is a terrifying thought. The idea that my loyalty, the very thing they claim to want, could be used to make me pay more because they know I'm a sure thing. It makes you want to pay with cash and leave your phone in the car. Olivia: It really does. And it leaves us with a profound question to ponder: What is a fair trade for our privacy? A 20% off coupon? A personalized recipe suggestion? A slightly faster checkout? The aisles have eyes, and they are watching us decide. Jackson: It’s a decision we’re making every time we shop, whether we realize it or not. We'd love to hear what you all think. Find us on our socials and share your thoughts on where you draw the line. What’s the moment where convenience becomes creepy for you? Olivia: We’d be fascinated to know. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.