Home Depot Shopping Carts Spout Text-Based Marketing Messages

This unnecessarily long article by Forbes, chock-full of handy-dandy survey data, tells us one -- well, two -- important things:

- A new concept is born: "shopper marketing." (Known to you traditionalists -- har har -- as in-store advertising.)
- Concept shopping carts are getting outfitted with a text messaging device, courtesy of Modstream. It's appearing at Home Depots in 8 states.

The idea is that shoppers, which haven't warmed much to video-outfitted shopping carts, will take advantage of coupons, or marketing messages, or whatever-else, at their fingertips.

This would be a neat idea if the text function reflected deals in the aisle that shoppers were on. (And maybe it does.) People don't like being pulled in disparate directions by marketing messages.

We know this for a fact: Our parents have a supermarket route that can't be interrupted, come hail or hurricane. God forbid you forget to swoop something up after they've passed through -- you're simply fucked.