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Assignment C - Part 2.i
Authentic Text
Check the Class Description and Notes on Part 2 on the assignment platform before you begin.
The text should be 500 - 700 words long. (4-5 minutes for listening texts).
In this document, provide a copy of the reading text or a transcript of the listening text you have
chosen.
Ensure the text is referenced, and if you have selected a listening text or video, provide a link.
If you choose a reading text, you can shorten and/or adapt it slightly.
Please supply a copy of the original and your adapted version.
If you have adapted the text, briefly explain the decisions you've made about changing the text
in section b) of the essay.
Highlight 12 vocabulary items (words or phrases) which would be useful to pre-teach.
Part A: Adapted/shortened text
The bad things that happen when algorithms run online shops
Smart software controls the prices and products you see when you shop online – and
sometimes it can go spectacularly wrong, from causing offence to destroying livelihoods. But that’s
the trouble with algorithms. All sorts of unexpected results can occur. Sometimes these are costly,
but in other cases they have benefited businesses to the tune of millions of pounds. What’s the real
impact of the machinations of machines? And what else do they do?
Errant algorithms can also cause human headaches when it comes to prices. The costs of
products that appear on retail websites are constantly fluctuating thanks to software that sets them
competitively. The frequency at which these changes happen is so great that dedicated websites
have been set up to “watch” the pricing on websites like Amazon. Daniel Green has been running
one of these sites for years. He explains that prices don’t just change daily – but sometimes several
times in one day.
“They will drop the price of a product every few days or every few hours until a product is
purchased by someone and then the price goes back up,” he says. “We know that they keep prices
low on a lot of their most popular products to give the impression that they have great deals and
, then for less active product categories or less popular products they may have a bit more of a profit
margin there.”
Sometimes this can produce amusing and unexpected results, however, in what Green calls a
“race to the bottom”. Two retailers selling the same thing on Amazon’s marketplace will re-price
their product against their competitor, but the re-pricing can occasionally continue unabated until
absurdly low or high price points are reached. “It just goes back and forth,” says Green.
Sometimes the most damaging prices are the lowest – as low as you can get, for example.
This was what blighted the Christmas sales of a string of Amazon marketplace sellers in December
last year, when automated re-pricing software Reprice Express erroneously changed the price of
thousands of items to as little as one penny or one cent. The glitch, which happened two weeks
before Christmas, hit sellers running small retail businesses extremely hard.
Part of the trouble was that once orders had been placed, they were almost instantly
processed by Amazon’s automated warehouse systems under the “Fulfilled by Amazon” (FBA)
programme. Sellers asked the FBA team to stop sending these orders out but were told it wasn’t that
simple. Amazon says that nothing about the operation of this system has changed since the
December incident.
“It almost felt like somebody broke into your house or your personal life and started to take
things away from you,” says Richard Burri, whose office stationery store was affected by the error.
He and his wife estimate that the various computer algorithms working together would have cost
the business between $100,000 and $150,000. Fortunately, the majority of the firm’s human
customers who had bought one penny items agreed to return them when contacted.
Others found that buyers weren’t always so obliging. Shamir Patel sold pharmaceutical
products via Amazon. He also asked customers to return one penny products, but he says about half
of them refused to do so. The cost to his business, he calculates, was around £60,000. “You were a
bit powerless to do anything about it,” he recalls. “You were literally just watching your money
flush down the drain.”
Yet another seller, Judith Blackford, who marketed dolls and babies’ gifts, says she suffered
sleepless nights and adds that she has been forced to close her business completely. “I’m selling off
any stock that’s left now. Pretty much most of it is going out half price just to get rid of the stock,”
she says. “It’s made me not really want to go on with the business.”
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