The Attack Of The Chicken Babies
Written by Evan SchumanAs part of an extensive recent retail sensor trial, technicians noticed a strange phenomena, one where testing equipment seemed to make every grocery store examined appear to be a massive nursery.
The Nielsen-deployed aisle sensors were using thermal measuring, using a customer’s body heat to indicate a person, which was intended to count the number of people in an aisle at any one point. But the devices registered an awfully large numbers of babies sitting in the shopping cart seats, according to Peter Hoyt, executive director of In-Store Marketing, a company coordinating that trial. It turns out that they were interpreting fresh-roasted hot chickens—which were emitting significant body heat and were sitting in the baby seat—as newborns. The devices were then reprogrammed and the attack of the chicken babies was quickly halted. (We deserve brownie points for having resisted saying that the test results were foul.)
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
