Retailers Watching Us

Article Title: How Retailers Study us to Maximize Profit
Author: Jay O'Donnell and Sarah Meehan
Credibility: Article in USA Today

Large retail stores such as Target y have been using very controversial methods in studying their average customer in order to maximize their profits. Stores have been using their surveillance cameras and employees to monitor trends of specific types of shoppers. Target has claimed that their observation methods were so well, that they could predict if a women was pregnant, even before the women's father knew.

These drastic claims by Target have made some customers feel violated, and that the stores at which they shop know too much about customers' personal lives. Some of Target's observation methods include:

• Monitoring what paths shoppers take in the store.
• Counting the number of children in the store at a given time.
• Signs with digital cameras that can detect where customers look on the sign.
• Seeing how customers interact with different products in the store.

All these methods, and many more are methods used by Target to understand how and why buyers purchase what they do. Target concludes that people are attracted to big changes, such as drastic bargains, store remodeling, interesting commercials and signs, and customer aprecitation such as bargains of a persons birthday. Target claims that they use psychologists to come to these conclusions. The numbers of Targets success do not lie, and these observations have proven very successful for their profits.