Hay is convinced Amazon is listening to her. She looks briefly at something online, or mentions it at home, and within hours she is being followed around the internet by adverts for it. Shoes, furniture, kitchen equipment, whatever it happens to be. Amazon has apparently stationed a small commercial intelligence unit in the sitting room.
I don't get that. I can spend days looking at motorcycles, carburettors, sidecars, welding equipment, classic car parts and tools of increasingly doubtful necessity, yet the adverts mostly leave me alone. The exception is motorcycle clothing. I have been bombarded with motorcycle clothing, but unfortunately for the advertising industry I won't buy that new either.
That was when it occurred to me that the difference is not that Hay is being listened to and I am not. The internet has almost certainly profiled both of us perfectly. The difference is that Hay looks at things which are still being manufactured. Most of the stuff I research was last available new when John Major was Prime Minister.
I am not usually looking for a current product from a retailer with an advertising budget. I am looking for a used carburettor from a dismantled Yamaha, a sidecar built before anyone had heard the phrase lifestyle brand, or a Triumph panel being sold by a man in a shed who regards email as an unnecessary complication. There is no glossy marketing campaign for any of that.
Even when the algorithms find something they can sell me, such as motorcycle jackets, they run into the same problem. I look at the advert, decide the price is ridiculous, disappear down a small rabbit hole of reviews and protection ratings, then buy one second-hand from Facebook Marketplace.
So the internet is not failing to understand me. It understands me all too well. Somewhere, a computer has reduced me to: retired male, motorcycles, classic cars, engineering, high browsing activity, almost no chance of paying full retail price.
Hay is a potential customer.
I am an administrative overhead.
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