This is how things are now.

The other day I was shopping for some end-of-season discounts on ski gear. I'm okay for snowboard stuff, but I could use some new ski gloves, and you can never have too many socks and base layers.

I found a few things, put them in my shopping cart, but then I got distracted and didn't complete the transaction.

I came back the next day, only to find that the shopping cart had timed out and all my selected items had flown back to their various departments. I didn't really need anything, so I rage-quit the browser tab and thought no more of the issue.

…except that for the last week the retailer has been stalking me around the web, mainly but not only on Facebook, with ads for exactly the items I had been looking at.

So let me get this straight: you know who I am, you know what I was looking at, and you're willing to pay Mark Zuckerberg to show me ads for those products - but you can't be bothered simply to leave the items in my shopping cart so I could, I don't know, check out and pay you for them?

An ounce worth of common sense beats ten tonnes of "social intelligence", "sentiment analysis", and stalker-ish Facebook advertising - trust me on this.

Image by Elisabetta Foco via Unsplash