Simon Property Group, which owns 370 shopping malls all across the United States, is teaming up with a Silicon Valley startup called Shopkick to try and make mobile coupons work. How long have we been hearing about mobile coupons, and how successful have they been? Anyway, I digress.
Beginning this month 25 malls in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago will get the equipment necessary to enable support for Shopkick’s coupons. A Simon Property Group mall typically has 140 stores on average. Participating stores will have to install speakers at the entrance to their shop and said speakers will emit a high frequency noise that supposedly people can’t hear, but the microphones in our mobile phones can. If a customer is walking by then they can activate the Shopkick application, available only for iPhone and Android by the way, point their device at a store, and start receiving points, gift certificates, news about sales and specials, or whatever else a store can think of to get you to come inside and hand them your money.
There are also 4 other big name stores trying Shopkick’s technology: Macy’s, Best Buy, and two who don’t wish to be identified. Macy’s will have Shopkick up and running in 150 of their 800 stores starting next week. Best Buy is being tight lipped about their plans, but says that some stores in San Francisco will get the new coupon technology.
All of this sounds great, right? Wrong. Whenever I read “high frequencies that people can’t hear”, I start to cringe. I’m still young, mid 20s, and I can hear high frequency noises. I’ve been to shopping malls where they actually used high frequency noises to keep young people away from the front of the building in order to stop loitering. It’s 2010 and we have NFC, bar code scanners, SMS, and a whole heap of technology, yet we’re counting on a buzzz coming out of some tiny speaker to save people 15% off their over priced HDMI cables?
No. Fuck that. And big box retailers wonder why Amazon is eating their lunch. This is only going to force more and more young people to shop online as to avoid the painful noises they have to endure while navigating around the obese ladies in scooters that live in the basement food court. Those online shopping habits will stay with them even as they get older and ironically, start to lose their hearing.
And what about moms and dads who take their kids to the mall? What happens when those little bundles of joy start screaming “MOM, LET’S GET THE HELL OUT OF THIS PLACE!”
I rest my case.
Update: Here’s a 13 minute 20 second demo of the application on an iPhone 4, courtesy of TechCrunch: