OK, they’re not actually lobbying for it, but they are keeping their eyes peeled. And odds are you already sorta know about it. So don’t go looking all shocked.
Most likely you’ve already signed up for one type of store discount card or another. Hey, I understand. It can save you some cash with just a flick of the card at checkout. But, of course, the bonuses go both ways. The stores are happy to give you the price cuts because, through the magic of digital information collection, they’re keeping an eye on what you spend and when you spend it.
An article by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times Magazine opened my eyes. It talked about people, their buying habits and how companies use statistics about those habits to bolster their bottom line. And it turns out that some retailers, specifically Target, would love to see its customers pregnant. A Target statistician named Andrew Pole told Duhigg of how he came up with a pregnancy predictor. Writes Duhigg:
The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole's colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.
Why do they want to know this? Because people do just about everything out of habit. And when they’re going through big life changes—like graduating, getting married or having a baby—they break out of their normal habits and routines. If a store can bombard them with the appropriate physical and digital advertizing at the right time, it’ll likely make itself a part of the customer’s new habitual routines. In other words, pay dirt!
Duhigg went on to tell a tale that took place about a year after Target first implemented this program. An irate gent stormed into a Minneapolis store with his fist full of coupons.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” the man said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The store manager apologized profusely. But in a few days it turned out that, oops, the man’s daughter already was pregnant. Target just knew about it before he did.
So who knows, your local supermarket may know things about you that even your own family doesn’t have a clue about. Or, for that matter, they may be electronically computing statistical probabilities and know something that you don’t even know yet. Have you been including ice cream and, say, pickles on your shopping list?
We can only hope big retail doesn’t connect somehow with Facebook’s data files on us. Why, they’d rule the world.
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