The bot army my wife raised to automate work and household chores went public two weeks ago, but now she's unleashed it on a new and most sinister target: surveillance pricing at her favorite online retailers.
The price used to be the price. You walked up and down the grocery store aisles, and each item had a sticker attached by human hands with the price clearly printed on it. The numbers on the stickers didn't magically go higher as you made your way to the checkout aisle, also manned by a human being.
Online retailers, on the other hand, know pretty much everything about you and can tailor your checkout price based on everything, including your buying history, the items you leave in your cart for later, browsing habits, what device you're using, location data, and even the time of day. If Amazon didn't charge extra for Pepto on New Year's Day, I'd almost be disappointed.
Retailers do this because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize revenues, and also because they're kinda d***s.
But thanks to Grok Bots, even a non-coder like Melissa can fight back. Did I say "non-coder?" She didn't even need to type.
As previously discussed, Melissa downloaded the Grok Bot app, put it into Speak mode — there's a button in the text input area that says Speak — and had a conversation about what she thought she'd like to automate, and if it had any suggestions about other areas of her life Grok Bots could handle.
Here's what she put together on a lazy Sunday afternoon:
I have nine staff bots reporting to a chief of staff. One manages the kitchen and groceries, learns what we keep in the pantry and freezers, and compares my monthly Subscribe & Save prices with Walmart before each order goes through.
An executive-assistant bot checks my personal email every morning, adds filing rules, alerts me when a spam sender changes its address, and updates the relevant rule.
My webmaster bot updates my author website [Melissa writes novels now, too]. My metadata and production bot checks details such as ISBNs, while my marketing and production bot works in Kit to draft and format newsletters and monitor open and click-through rates.
Melissa estimates that her bot army saves her ten hours a week. That's an additional three weeks each year she gets to do whatever she wants with. And she's just getting started.
And Another Thing: My next automation column will go into my burgeoning VodkaPundit Bot Army. I'm gonna take over the world, yo.
The shopping part is especially nice since we have two sons who consume groceries like — metaphor fails me this once. Nothing consumes groceries like two young men between the ages of 16 and 20. What Melissa's bots don't have is access to her credit cards because we aren't idiots. They can put things into shopping carts and take them out, but they can't make purchases.
That's when Melissa got a great idea: not only comparison-shop between Amazon and Walmart, but also shop the same retailer anonymously to catch personalized pricing.
Automatically.
She told her Chief of Staff bot to create a new shopping bot that does its shopping in Private Mode in a browser that she doesn't use for anything else. The Anony-Bot reports back to the COS its findings, and then the COS issues new orders to the regular shopping bot.
Melissa didn't have to figure any of this out herself; that's what the COS bot is for.
But as things stand now, we have bots keeping an eye on how prices change throughout the week, and adjusting various shopping carts automatically. All of it takes place invisibly, in the background, without further worry or intervention.
Who watches the Watchmen? We do.
The system isn't foolproof, of course. Anonymous comparison shopping provides only so much protection against surveillance pricing. But at the very least, using bots to switch around your shopping habits makes it harder to predict when Melissa will hit the virtual checkout lane. That takes some power away from the massive retailers, and puts it back where it belongs: with their customers.
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