Walmart’s audio patent latest way to track workers
Customer service phone lines routinely tell consumers their “call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes.” But a new Walmart patent shows the retailer might someday collect checkout line sounds and capture conversations between customers and the cashier ringing up their milk and diapers.
The patent, which was reported by BuzzFeed on Wednesday, would use a system of sound sensors to listen in on workers’ activities and interactions, gathering audio data such as the beeps and rustling of bags to determine the number of items in a transaction, the patent says, or conversations between cashiers and customers to hear whether, say, workers were greeting customers.
“A need exists for ways to capture the sounds resulting from people in the shopping facility and determine performance of employees based on those sounds,” the retail behemoth wrote in its patent application, called “Listening to the Frontend.”
The technology may never be built or implemented — it is only a patent — but provides yet another example of the ways employers are using technology to more closely monitor employee behavior and collect vast amounts of data to manage them.
Earlier this year, Amazon won patents for a wristband that would verify whether warehouse workers are correctly processing items, setting off vibrations to guide workers’ hands to the right bin, reported GeekWire. UPS uses sensors to track things like whether seat belts are being worn and the opening and closing of doors on its delivery trucks, according to ABC News.
Technology even exists that allows companies to track workplace keyboards to see how fast employees are typing, said Brian Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s human resources practice, as well as place sensors in workers’ chairs to track how much they’re not sitting at their desks.
“But is that because they’re going and talking and collaborating with their colleagues or because they’re going out to take a smoke break?” Kropp said. While the tools for collecting more and more data are increasingly available, he said, for the most part, “the models to turn that data into knowledge are not there.”
Walmart did not immediately respond to emails with a comment or more information about the patent, but said in a statement to BuzzFeed that “we’re always thinking about new concepts and ways that will help us further enhance how we serve customers, but we don’t have any further details to share on these patents at this time.”
In its patent, Walmart indicated the concept was designed as a possible efficiency hack that could help decrease store costs and boost guest satisfaction, writing that “one way to track performance metrics for employees is the use of a system including sound sensors near point of sale (‘POS’) terminals.” The system could “correlate the audio data with an employee that is stationed at the terminal, and determine a performance metric for the employee.”
The patent’s focus on datadriven efficiency fits with “the next frontier” for retailers, said Neil Stern, senior partner at the retail consultancy McMillanDoolittle, in an email.
“The prior era of retail was focused on growth — retailers could remain inefficient in the way they ran their businesses as long as they could open new stores and drive comp store sales, the two measures they were essentially rated on,” he said.
But “the future will now be about how efficiently the box can be run,” Stern said. While the patent may seem invasive, Stern believes retail employees, many of whom are already under security video surveillance, might tune out the monitoring relatively quickly, even if it leads to a greater discussion about privacy and employee rights.
“When does it cross the line between data efficiency and an outright invasion of privacy?” he said.
Paula Brantner, a senior adviser for Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit organization providing legal information to workers about their rights, said if Walmart were to use the patent someday, she hoped they would communicate, as call centers do, that employees and customers are being monitored, as well as “that this is how the monitoring would be used and that they would not use it in a punitive way, but to make employees’ lives easier.”