A closer look
Retailers have been trying to gamify your misery for decades. Before smart cameras tracked your every move in Amazon Go stores, early 2000s supermarkets experimented with putting literal GPS modules into the handles of shopping carts. They wanted to track exactly how long you lingered in the junk food aisle and strategically remap the store to trap you in a consumerist maze. The project mostly died because GPS signals are garbage inside giant metal warehouses, proving that terrible ideas are often saved by equally terrible infrastructure.
