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Smile, you're on consumer behavior camera. No surprise that you'll likely be videotaped while holiday shopping, but it's not all for security. Some of it is for market research. Retailers are tracking you to learn how you shop.
"Where people, shoppers, are spending time? What is grabbing their attention? Are they having to wait too, too long for customer service at different points?"
Consumer behavior analysis, it's part observation, part science, part technology and a bit of psychology. Rajeev Sharma's software turns images of customers working their way through stores into hard data, allowing retailers to take fast action if things aren't working out.
"You can move around the merchandise to position of products so that it, it, it creates the right sequence, and right products in front of the right people in the right time."
With the holiday shopping crunch, retailers know their customers have short fuses, and crowd hassles don't help.
"And you can create this kind of maps, the hot spots and the cold spots. These are extremely important because there's no number. By just looking at this, this color-coded map, you can see which portion of this store is receiving more attention."
And that helps retailers decide where to place display units.
"After browsing, decided to interact with it, as in read labels or, or, or you know, experience it more. And finally, of course, what every product and retailer, er, the product manufacturer and retailer want you to drop it into your basket."
But it's not all creative marketing; traffic jams at checkout are often the biggest problem.
"What this shows is a, is a line-forming, and something that you are very familiar with in this, this season."
Best Buy is using its own research to try to shorten those lines.
"We now deploy a queuing system in our stores, where all customers, they wait in a queue, and we have somebody there directing traffic, so you don't get caught in the wrong line, which drives people crazy."
Ali Velshi, CNN, New York.
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