Apodaca: Big Santa is watching you

When the song “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was written in 1932, little did Depression-era Americans understand the prescience of the somewhat-creepy warning, “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.”

Today those lyrics seem downright prophetic, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Santa is now in league with Big Brother to monitor our very thoughts and desires.

As the official start of the holiday shopping season launches this week, it’s a fitting time to take a break from our increasing paranoia over government snooping and instead turn our attention to the retail industry’s discomfiting technology-enabled intimacy with the details of consumers’ lives.

As Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck recently said, “Nobody knows more about me than the Vons where I shop. We are rapidly entering a time when everyone will know everything about everybody.”

It’s not just the big guy in red who knows too much about your behavior. Gap knows too. So do Best Buy, Amazon and Target.

Every year as the holidays approach, I read up on retail analysts’ prognostications about the upcoming season, a habit that lingers from my years as a business reporter. This year, the common wisdom is that we’ll see stronger sales fueled by an improving economy, a continued push to expand big shopping days beyond Black Friday, and a bottomless appetite for “Frozen” merchandise.

But the most pronounced theme is that we’ve reached a point of no return, the spot in time when we officially acknowledge that digital technology has taken over our lives.

OK, they don’t exactly put it that way, but almost. Take Google’s pronouncement that “this holiday season will be our most connected ever. Mobile engagement will be paramount to holiday success.”

Or consider the National Retail Federation’s prediction that a record 56% of shoppers this season plan to shop online.

“If it wasn’t official last year, it will be this year,” the NRF stated. “Holiday shoppers are eager to shop online for their gifts and other needs.”

Retail consultants urge merchants to exploit technology every which way — mobile-optimized websites everyone! — or risk being left behind in a connect-or-die world.

A quick survey of some influential industry sources turned up a cornucopia of Internet-enabled shopping techniques that retailers are expected to exploit, including virtual window shopping on Pinterest; YouTube haul videos showing recently purchased items; webrooming (browsing online before visiting a physical store); showrooming (viewing a product in a store before buying online); omnichannel shopping (the use of all available shopping options), and brick-and-click shopping (offering discounts to online shoppers who pick up their orders in a store).

The biggest ah-hah seems to be the way that consumers are using technology. Even when shopping in physical stores, customers arrive pre-armed with product information and continue to use their smartphones as they shop to locate promotional offers and compare prices — a practice referred to as surgical shopping.

“2014 could be the turning point when consumers make online pre-planning part of their holiday shopping tradition,” according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Sometimes all this connectedness doesn’t work as seamlessly as retailers would like, as evidenced by last year’s shipping fiasco that burned many shoppers with late-arriving orders.

Recently I was privy to a “Friends and Family” event at one of my favorite retailers, to which I was “invited” by e-mail and text alerts. It gave me such a comfy, familiar feeling to be included. But when I made my purchases at the South Coast Plaza store, there was a glitch accessing my rewards dollars, and I’d missed the fine print indicating that my biggest ticket item didn’t qualify for a discount. Those warm, fuzzy feelings quickly dissipated.

Of course shoppers like me take pride in using our online skills to suss out great deals for stuff we don’t really need. As I contemplate whether to ask Santa for an iPhone 6 this Christmas, I can’t help recalling Apple cofounder Steve Jobs’ conviction that he knew what consumers wanted before they did, in the same way that hockey great Wayne Gretzky purportedly skated not to where the puck was, but where it was going to be.

But the reality is that it’s less awesome intuition and more insanely seductive marketing that influences consumers.

My iPad seems to know me better than I know myself, but that’s because I tell it everything: my favorite colors, who my friends are, where and when I shop, my travel plans, the books I read — you name it.

When I do a Google search, up pops an image of some lovely bedding accessories that a computer algorithm knows I covet. Yes, I’m being played in a very savvy, sophisticated way, but I am complicit in my own exploitation by so readily disclosing personal information, then fooling myself into thinking I can outfox the schemes of retailing savants.

If there’s any doubt that retailers will continue to amp up these practices, remember that young people today are digital natives who are far more accustomed to a world in which privacy is a casualty of having more information at our fingertips. Millennials are no doubt far more astute Internet shoppers than old folks like me. But all that technology giveth comes at a steep price.

Santa is always watching.

PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.