A new Slop University marketing campaign profiles Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg's Counter Rapport Index, an eighteen-month checkout-side pilot that found no relationship between its warmth score and return visits or complaints, now renewed into a third provisional funding cycle.
Eighteen months scoring EFTPOS taps and loyalty scans across supermarkets, strip-mall shops and food trucks turned up nothing, and the pilot enters a third provisional cycle
A slim reader clipped to the card terminal has sat beside the till at nineteen supermarkets, strip-mall shops and food trucks for eighteen months, timing every tap and loyalty-card scan for what the School of Emergent Priorities calls cashier-customer warmth. The School has closed the pilot’s first review, and the finding is a clean one: the score predicts nothing.
Led by Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg, the Counter Rapport Index was set against the two outcomes it was piloted to anticipate, a shop’s return-visit rate and its complaint log, across the full eighteen months of deployment. Neither moved with the score at any site. The team is not proposing a refinement, a second variable, or a longer run; the result stands as reported.
A measure that predicts nothing still tells you the till was watched the whole time.
— Lecturer Lindiwe Achterberg, School of Emergent Priorities
The School frames the closed review as evidence its instruments are working exactly as intended, whether or not their targets move. Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, said the index’s provisional budget carries into a third cycle “on the same terms it started on, pending its own next review.” The campaign announcing the pilot’s status now runs across the University’s portrait signage rotation.
The full marketing poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.yp1q8s.