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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

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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> 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.

It works this way in the rest of the country. Not just the bay area.

> 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.

It would be a shame if large stores intentionally blocked cell reception so customers would use WiFi instead....

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.

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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