Shopping cart tokens

 

Image from Pixabay

Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn abolishes the shopping cart tokens. That’s something, isn't it? Chances are you're too young to know that in the older days you could grab a cart without putting a coin in it (and then you also don't know that there were no computers and internet in the past, at least not from your own experience). The deposit on shopping carts was introduced around 1985.

It is interesting to look at the history of those coins. It often happened that trolleys were left in the parking lot of the supermarket, ended up in the bushes or in the ditch or were taken home, for example to serve as a rabbit hutch. Bad luck for other customers and a high cost for the store. And that's why from the mid-eighties you have to put a coin in the lock of the cart to release it from the row.

It used to be a guilder (pre-euro Dutch currency), then a euro or fifty cents. Real money, that is. That worked fine, because everyone wanted their money back. Not only in the Netherlands, by the way – you come across shopping cart locks in large parts of Europe, and to a lesser extent in North America. Of course, often customers wouldn’t have a matching coin at hand and then they had to go to the information desk of the supermarket for change. Cumbersome for both customer and store. And then something strange happened: store chains started issuing shopping cart tokens themselves, with their own logo on it. And they handed them out for free. From that moment on, the coin no longer had any financial value for the customer. One would think that the carts once again would be abandoned, but it didn’t turn out that bad. The customer knew no better than to return the thing.

And then came corona. To reduce the chance of contamination, you were to touch as few things as possible that others had touched. Shopping without a cart was of course impossible, but the lock was not essential. And so the locks were taped. From now on you could take your cart 'for free'. During this period, Albert Heijn has established that the number of missing shopping carts did not increase or decrease as a result. Moreover, by abolishing the coins, they solve a problem that they themselves had caused: all the coins together make a good mountain of plastic. And it also does away with irritated customers at the counter who don't have a coin in their pocket.

Suppose you run a certain internet service and you notice a risk in terms of the availability of your systems: they  are on the brink of overload. Because you have no means to increase the capacity, you take a measure to limit its use: users have to pay from now on. Mission accomplished: The number of users is decreasing. But social media quickly develop a grim mood among former users, who believe that your service is a necessity of life, which should be free. That mood also extends to paying customers. The marketing department intervenes: the service will again be free, but customers will be served advertising from now on. The yield is just enough to keep the available systems up and running.

You're out of luck: the company that provides the advertising has been hacked, putting your customers at risk of being infected with a virus. You are forced to turn off the advertising and visitors can use your service for free and without advertising, like they did in the past. The administrators wait in suspense, but to their relief, after a few weeks, the systems appear to be holding up – the adjustment does not lead to a large influx of new visitors.

How realistic is a scenario like this? Like, a measure that used to be necessary is now superfluous? That would be nice, wouldn't it? It’s possible when circumstances have changed. Perhaps we have all started to behave more responsibly, more maturely, so that we take it for granted that we put our shopping cart neatly in line again. Perhaps a few decades with coins and tokens have conditioned us to such an extent that it doesn't even occur to most people to abandon their cart.

I try to think of which measure has become superfluous in my field. I can’t come up with an entire measure that you can throw overboard, but I give you the application of a measure: encryption. You encrypt information to ensure its confidentiality. But not all information has to remain secret for eternity. For example, the minutes of the Dutch Cabinet will be made public after twenty years.

Let me know if you know of other examples of security measures that have become obsolete over time.

  

And in the big bad world…

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

• password manager company LastPass has been hacked.  [DUTCH]
• hackers have more or less demonstrated Signal's security.
• even something as fuzzy as NFTs is interesting to thieves.  [DUTCH]
• Twitter security is under fire.  [DUTCH]
• security awareness is also important for car manufacturers.
• law and technology do not always go hand in hand.  [DUTCH]
• these tips for digital privacy might help you.
• investigative services should do better hacking, so as not to have to weaken cryptography.  [DUTCH]
• the LED on the network card of a hacked air-gapped computer reveals secrets.  [DUTCH]