We should be careful about words, expressions, and catchphrases, especially those political hyperboles that buttress the statist zeitgeist of our time. You are a product of greedy corporations. The author of the May 16 Economist newsletter “The World in Brief” says it in passing:
Walmart’s ad operation is much smaller than that of Amazon, which is ahead in e-commerce and video streaming. But Walmart has the advantage in the ground war. In its 10,000 stores advertisers can buy access to customers on signs, screens and in-store radio. Next time you browse a supermarket for products, remember that you are a product too.
It is not clear what exactly the journalist is referring to. To verify, I went to my usual Walmart but I did not see a single third-party ad—except of course for the brand names and slogans of the products on the shelves. I didn’t see any screen or hear any advertisement. The retailer does sell advertising to third-party sellers on its Walmart Marketplace website, though. What is the problem anyway with Walmart selling advertising?
Information related to your possible interest in exchanging is part of living in any society above the tribe or command society, especially in a prosperous society. Such information is quite certainly more beneficial for most people than state propaganda. Does private advertising mean that you are a product? Are you even a product of Google when it sells data that you give away by using its free services? According to Merriam-Webster, a product is “something (such as a service) that is marketed or sold as a commodity.” A slave would be a product. A free person of course is not. Even in a figurative way, you cannot be a slave of sellers whose proposals you are free to decline without any threat of punishment.
Referring to their concept of “slavery of wage labor,” Marxists would say that Walmart workers are slaves, which does not make sense: at any time, they can walk away and work for somebody else or for themselves. If Walmart employees are not slaves, it is even more obvious that its customers are not, even if they are exposed to advertising when they choose to visit the company’s physical or virtual sites.
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The more abstract the topic you try to represent with DALL-E’s cooperation, the more difficult it is to obtain zir cooperation. It is not surprising because an AI bot does not think. The featured image of this post is the best I was able to obtain after a large number of instructions that were not understood.
A “product” in the process of grocery shopping, by DALL-E and PL
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
May 19 2024 at 10:35am
Your title reminds me of the classic line from the classic 1960s British TV show The Prisoner: “I am not a number! I am a free man!”
Or the Simpsons’s excellent spoof (from the start to the 20 second mark).
Pierre Lemieux
May 19 2024 at 10:59am
Jon: “The Prisoner” was a great and perhaps prefigurative figure. No microaggression there, only pure aggression. Be seeing you!
Dylan
May 19 2024 at 11:47am
We start to get to existential questions of what we mean by “you” here, but saying “you” are the product feels like a useful shorthand to remind people of the relationship dynamics are. While I may be a user of Google’s services, I am not the customer. The customer is someone that wants 1) to know as much about me as they possibly can and 2) my attention so they can sell me something. With those two things, they can do so pretty effectively. Without it, not so much (as we’ve seen with the rising costs of customer acquisition after Apple’s privacy changes back in 2021). So, a more accurate saying would be that my attention and information on who I am, what I like, what I don’t like, my hopes, dreams, fears (Ok, maybe their data profile of me isn’t quite that good yet, but certainly with Gemini, they are working up to it). So maybe the physical me isn’t the product, but it sounds a lot like the digital representation of me is.
P.S. I don’t go to Walmart regularly. There aren’t any near me. But, I did visit one a couple of months ago on a trip. An hour after I left, I received an email asking me to fill out a survey about my visit to that store. I didn’t give them my email address. I paid with a credit card, but the email address they sent the survey to, wasn’t the one I use for that credit card.
Monte
May 19 2024 at 1:27pm
I see your point and I agree that the journalist’s contextual use of the term is vague, but referring to someone as a product is common apothegm. For instance, referring to a college student as a product works from a marketing point of view. And aren’t we all, in the abstract, products of our past?
Craig
May 19 2024 at 1:51pm
We briefly discussed how the target of advertising might be viewed as the ‘product’ and if I recall you vehemently protested my characterization. So no need to resurrect the contest but if, GIVEN, my preferred characterization is assumed to be true:
“single third-party ad”
Those end caps would be one. The planogram itself is another. I am led to believe supplier pay for these placements. They also do offer supplier offered incentives. These would be general ads. When you buy things, particularly if you’re signed up with the W! App that’s consumer information and you might get targeted offers based on buying behavior. Not sure if W! receipts carry coupoms but many grocery stores do. Nevertheless when you go to W! are you a consumer buying products? Absolutely. Are you also the product in the sense that the fact you are a W! customer — in store or online — and are being subjected to advertising? Absolutely.
Craig
May 19 2024 at 2:11pm
Also Walmart Radio, I am not entirely sure, but have some confidence suppliers/vendors pay to be on that….
Pierre Lemieux
May 19 2024 at 2:14pm
Craig: One may define a “product” as one wishes (from a nominalist perspective, names are just labels) and even use it to attack free exchange. (That’s how Marxists use the term “slavery,” as another example. ) But then, except if this person really wants to be confusing, he will never say, “I bought this product at Walmart.”
Craig
May 19 2024 at 8:19pm
The Marxian connection is troubling for me of course, but hoping ypu accept my non-Communist bonafides? 😉
The flipside here is a supplier is also an advertising customer. But such is the world, not so binary. Perhaps other situatuons are a bit more obvious? Attending a baseball game perhaps, perhaps pumping gas while watching the TV screen? In both circumstances you are a customer AND you are being subjected to 3rd party advertising.
Matthias
May 20 2024 at 8:40am
I tried my own hand with GPT, and got this: https://photos.app.goo.gl/bKws1Me3TYC68CvJ9
You can judge for yourself, whether it’s any good.
Pierre Lemieux
May 20 2024 at 9:06pm
Mathias: That IS very good. Why didn’t I have this idea?
Richard W Fulmer
May 20 2024 at 12:46pm
When people stumble into a slogan that gains traction, others jump onboard – sometimes attempting to link their own causes to the meme. By the time someone observes that there is neither fact nor logic behind the curtain, a lot of damage may have been done.
Pierre Lemieux
May 20 2024 at 9:12pm
Richard: This is why I think we should be careful with words. I wonder if, in America, John Kenneth Galbaith was not a major relay of this idea that commercial advertising enslaves us (while government propaganda makes us free).
Student of Liberty
May 21 2024 at 10:08am
“It is not clear what exactly the journalist is referring to”
To me, the journalist is clearly referring to the following cartoon:
https://cheezburger.com/5246665216/pigs-explain-facebook-business-model
However, you are right to think he is mistaken: the fact that a business we are transacting with can reduce their prices through monetizing the footfall does not make a product of ourselves. Walmart is no Facebook.
Pierre Lemieux
May 21 2024 at 8:51pm
That’s a good point. All that probably goes back to the idea that “if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you are the product being sold.” But I would argue that this very “principle” is at best meaningless; at worst, it is a tactic for the enemies of commercial society to attack it by exploiting people who don’t really know what a free society is. I am not “the product” when I read the Wall Street Journal, which is probably mainly financed by advertising. I am not the product when somebody invites me to lunch. I am not the product when I pay an infinitesimal part of the cost of maintaining étiquette, language, morals, civilization. Charity, friendship, or a gift does not transform its recipient into a product of the giver. More generally, living in society (or in history) for an individual implies benefiting from many things he doesn’t pay for or even cannot pay for. How does one pay Renoir for his paintings? How does one pay Baudelaire or Yeats?
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