Argumentative Essay On Shopping

Argument Essay

Shopping is one of the most common social activities in our life. Lingering the merchandise in the stores from one to another, the customers are looking for the products that meet their requirements and making the decisions to purchase while enjoying the leisure time with their families or friends. At the same time, to achieve a better business performance, the retailers are trying to attract the customers to pay more attention to their products and stay longer in their stores by using various kinds of technologies to surveil the shoppers, such as using cameras to monitor their shopping behavior, tracking their purchased items, and even analyzing these consumers’ background. However, the surveillance of consumers by the retail anthropologists is manipulative and unethical, because it violates the customer’s rights of privacy and the rights of informed consent, while it psychologically manipulates the customers, and provides an access to the criminal activities as well.

On the one hand, surveilling the shoppers by observing them in various ways is infringing upon the consumer’s rights of privacy and the rights of informed consent. According to Ray Burke’s speech, “How stores track your shopping behavior / Ray Burke / TEDx Indianapolis”, on the TEDx Talks, the retailers are using methods like cameras to observe the consumers by capturing “their skeleton positions, where they are reaching, and where their head is facing” and “their facial expressions”, which