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A comment on Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shopping in stores.

Re:Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shoppi... by Theodores on Friday June 16, 2017 @01:26PM (#14570889)
The problem here is that people that use in store WiFi are too cheap to pay for their own 4g bandwidth. So these folk are frugal not big spenders. They will need to work with telcos to deep packet inspect customers triangulated to the store locations. And then to stop people shopping online.

With destination shopping, e.g. to buy a new sofa or bicycle, customers have invariably been online already and chose the store that way.

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Re:Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shoppi... by bgirard on Friday June 16, 2017 @01:32PM (#14570966)
> With destination shopping, e.g. to buy a new sofa or bicycle, customers have invariably been online already and chose the store that way.

Not necessarily. For $100-$1000 items I'll walk into a store without an intent to buy that day to price shop and if I'm tempted to buy I'll quickly check online and see if the store will price match. In the bay area I've actually had the store price match their own online store even though in store price had a '20% off sale'.

Seems pretty common for bay area stores to sell above their online prices and price match if you ask.

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Re:Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shoppi... by hayden592 on Friday June 16, 2017 @01:56PM (#14571181)
It works this way in the rest of the country. Not just the bay area.
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Re:Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shoppi... by Zak on Friday June 16, 2017 @02:01PM (#14571228)
> The problem here is that people that use in store WiFi are too cheap to pay for their own 4g bandwidth.

I usually use it when mobile reception is poor, not to save money. I've found poor reception inside larger stores to be a very common problem.

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Re:Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shoppi... by synaesthesisx on Friday June 16, 2017 @02:51PM (#14571688)
It would be a shame if large stores intentionally blocked cell reception so customers would use WiFi instead....
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Re:Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shoppi... by thefalcon on Friday June 16, 2017 @04:46PM (#14572525)
At some of the big box stores near me it doesn't even need to be intentional, they're just in a near blackout zone with my carrier. Their Wi Fi doesn't tend to perform a whole lot better though.
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Re:Amazon has a patent to keep people from comparison shoppi... by pilsetnieks on Friday June 16, 2017 @03:21PM (#14571910)
It would also be illegal and terrible for their image. Imagine, for example, the shitshow that would arise if they were caught intentionally blocking calls to emergency services, among other things.
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