Retailers Tracking Shoppers Inside Stores
BLITZER: If you walk around with your cell phone when you go shopping, guess what, big Brother may be watching you more than you think. Pamela Brown is joining us in New York. She's got details, shocking details I must say, on what's called retail tracking. Pam, we know surveillance cameras are watching all of us when we walk up and down the aisles but what else is going on?</s>PAMELA BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, turns out, when you walk into a store with your cell phone, you could be tracked by some brick-and- mortar stores. Nordstrom set up an experiment to gather data about their shoppers by tracking their Smartphones. They are not alone. We seem to accept being tracked online but now retailers are doing the same thing at their brick-and-mortar locations. Some shoppers are not happy about this.</s>UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Hello, welcome back to The Gap. How did the assorted tank tops work out for you?</s>BROWN (voice-over): Will the futuristic shopping experience be coming to a store near you? It's not as farfetched as you think. Retailers turning to technology, using video surveillance, and tracking signals from Smartphone to figure out how to get you to spend more.</s>TIM CALLAN, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, RETAILNEXT: The in-store analytics makes it possible for retailers to understand things like where they go, where they stop, and ultimately how all of it translated to sales at register.</s>BROWN: Upscale department chain Nordstrom ended a test program that gathered pings from Wi-Fi signals on customers' phones as they browse through the store. Some outraged after learning about the in-store surveillance. "Way over the line," one consumer wrote on Facebook. Take a look at this video. The camera is set up in the ceiling near the entrance. As people enter, the software pinpoints them follows them throughout the store. Retail Next, which is one of the companies providing the technology, says the software is so specific, it can tell exactly where inside the store a person is standing and even which direction their head is looking.</s>CALLAN: They know that there's a person and they know what that person is doing but they can't really marry it back to your personal identity.</s>BROWN: These heat maps are another tool. Red areas are spots where people stood looking at products for a long time. Still, shoppers have mixed feelings about being watched by big brother.</s>UNIDENTIFIED SHOPPER: When they're storing data, figuring out exactly where you go, it's an invasion of privacy.</s>BROWN: And Retail Next says its technology is in more than 5,000 stores worldwide, and that is just one company. Nordstrom says it was just testing the program. It ended in May. It says it didn't store any data, nor did it have any way of identifying individuals. But, Wolf, still a lot of shoppers are just freaked out by this, that they're being monitored through cell phones. Stores are saying this is our way of competing with online stores. Obviously, they have a leg up on them.</s>BLITZER: Certainly do. The technology, I must say, is almost breath taking to see what's going on --</s>BROWN: Yeah.</s>BLITZER: -- in these retail operations. Pamela Brown, thanks very much. Here's a question that a lot of us are interested in right now. Ben Bernanke, when he speaks, what happens? Well, Wall Street listens very, very carefully. The latest remarks from the Fed chief and how the markets are reacting.