Store Shelf Surveillance Cameras May Be Coming To A Supermarket Near You

Surveillance cameras on store shelves may sound like something out of 1984, but they could soon be coming to a store near you. Retailers are considering installing store shelf cameras in order to garner yet more personal purchasing information. The cameras will allegedly only be used to tract demographics associated with buying habits.

Every time you use one of those keychain store loyalty cards, your purchases are being tracked and buying habits analyzed. It was simple to avoid such corporate and potentially government monitoring simply by deciding not to earn pennies off your gas at Kroger or a percentage discount at Big Lots, by not allowing scans of the plastic cards at the checkout counter. Now, merely walking down the aisle and browsing sale items will land you on candid camera.

The so-called “retail surveillance” cameras will store images of folks as they pick up items from a store shelf so companies can learn how to better market their products. Approximate age and sex are among the noted data which is allegedly so pertinent to businesses in our modern society that they are willing to violate customers’ privacy. It is more than possible that the store shelf cameras will also generate findings based on race, weight, and even approximate income, academic prowess, and sexual preference. Sure, it is beyond politically incorrect to say that educated guesses about the above personality traits are possible simply by looking at a person’s appearance and actions, but they often are. The way we look, move, act, speak, and dress are all solid indicators about our personalities and backgrounds.

Mondelez is the company behind the retail surveillance camera project. The company owns Nabisco, Chips Ahoy, Oreo, Triscuit, Wheat Thins, Nilla, Cadbury, Trident, Certs, Stride, Kraft Philadelphia, Ritz, and other popular name brand snack food items. Mondelez is reportedly a multinational company. According to Bloomberg, PepsiCo was approached about buying the Illinois-based snack food company, but turned down the deal. The soft drink giant allegedly considered the acquisition risky due to Mondelez’s “reliance on slow-growth Western European” markets.

Retail surveillance cameras are expected to hit store shelves in early 2015, perhaps in a high-tech effort to fatten up their bottom line quickly. The shelving units will reportedly be equipped with built-in cameras and be installed in grocery stores across the country. Mondelez will reportedly use the information garnered from the store shelf cameras to create a database about customers’ “basic information.”

InfoWars shared this in a previous report about the advertising industry’s attempt to initiate RFID outdoor advertising surveillance technology:

“Indeed, this kind of advertising had already been rolled out, and we can only expect more sophisticated versions of it to emerge in the near future. We have previously covered he fact that private industry and eventually government, are set to implement plans to use microphones and cameras in computers and TiVo style boxes of hundreds of millions of Americans to monitor their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles, which will be used for invasive advertising anddata mining.”

Mondelez would likely want to know the buying habits of customers from all locations, and situate their snack food displays accordingly. The cookie, crackers, and chips manufacturer is perhaps the first company to discuss its retail surveillance camera plans publicly, but is not likely the only company planning on utilizing the new technology to their benefit.

Surveillance cameras in urban areas and inside major retailers most generally run their footage on a loop, recording over the prior day when no incident warranting additional review occurs. The store shelf cameras are designed not to enhance safety and stop theft inside a store, their sole purpose is to zoom in and discover who is buying what, how much they are buying and how often they as filling their grocery carts.

[Image Via: Shutterstock.com]