Tesco to monitor millions of consumers around the world

[Sweetpea]

Tesco is to monitor and record the shopping habits of more than 60 million customers around the world in an unprecedented deal with the “Big Brother” company behind its Clubcard loyalty card scheme.
The supermarket chain’s partnership with Dunnhumby, the market research specialist, is being rolled out to nine countries where Tesco operates, including Thailand, South Korea and China but not, as yet, the United States.
Dunnhumby has worked with Tesco in the UK since Clubcard was introduced in 1995. Analysts claim that its vast database of shopping preferences has been one of the supermarket’s biggest competitive advantages over the past decade.
Every day Dunnhumby crunches data taken from Tesco’s tills to generate a picture of what its 13.5 million Clubcard holders are buying and why they may be switching products.
Discount coupons and promotions are targeted at individuals based on extensive records of their past purchases.
The new agreement is almost certain to spark yet more controversy over Tesco’s power. It already claims nearly £1 of every £7 spent on the high street and is set to report pretax profits of nearly £3 billion on Tuesday. It will now have the potential to map every tendency of a customer base equal in size to the population of the United Kingdom.
Dunnhumby, which is majority owned by Tesco, generates most of its revenue by selling on the data in an anonymous form to some of the world’s biggest companies, such as Coca-Cola and Unilever, to help them to devise marketing campaigns.

Tesco to monitor millions of consumers around the world - Times Online


Big brother eh!

Here in Germany Lidl have just been caught out doing something similar, but including secretly filming customers (CCTV).

They are likely to be fined a couple of tens of millions.

[Sweetpea]

Will that happen to Tesco? I doubt it.

Would in Germany.

[poppy]

We have Lidl in Tod, it is small by comparison to Tesco, but the produce is far superior, fresh organic veg every day, and most of it grown in England. Good store so far. The German workers rebuilt it stocked it and opened it in just over two months from start to finish. Never seen builders work like that before.
But I think Tesco have really been doing this spying and tab keeping for years, when I did shop there I always refused to have a loyalty card, just a thing I have about being on record, I prefer to be a none person.

[Sweetpea]

Walked in Lidl once. Saw not one brand I knew, and walked straight out again.

[poppy]

I pretty much only buy veg and pasta, they sell very good Italian pasta and olive oil and such. Most of the time I shop in our market, when the veg man is there. But as supermarkets go, for fresh organic veg Lidl is best and the cheapest.

Trouble with Lidl is that if you only want a couple of bottles of beer, you STILL have to wait in a queue that snakes sixteen times around the shelves.

[poppy]

Originally Posted by von Clausewitz

Trouble with Lidl is that if you only want a couple of bottles of beer, you STILL have to wait in a queue that snakes sixteen times around the shelves.

That is true, no 10 items or under and no baskets. The staff in ours are very good at opening more checkouts , and Todites usually tell you to go in front if you only have a couple of items, so not really a problem.

[Sweetpea]

Our one is always populated sparsely, by pensioner's and down and outs.