Target knows yer all knocked up

Kyuss Apollo · #1 02-20-2012, 07:13 PM

Beware pregnant ladies!

According to a recent article in Forbes (and the NYT), you're the target. Of Target statistician Andy Pole:

Quote:

Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. From the NYT:

Quote:

[Pole] 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.

Or have a rather nasty infection…

Quote:

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

It gets better.

Quote:

An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

Quote:

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he 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 manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

(Nice customer service, Target.)

Quote:

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Which leads me to wonder whether Target sends anyone's daughter coupons for prophylactics based on her purchasing history...

Vivisectus · #2 02-20-2012, 07:29 PM

Hah! I rebel against all the data-mining by always giving my tesco clubcards to the person behind me in the queue.

lisarea · #3 02-20-2012, 08:01 PM

They don't just track by club cards, though. They can track you by your credit or debit cards, coupons, and other stuff too.

I did used to trade store cards with other people sometimes, and sometimes use generic phone numbers as IDs at some stores. (There was one at Kroger that always had like $9000 in purchases toward the end of the month, but it doesn't work anymore.)

Ultimately, though, you also have to pay cash to keep your purchases relatively private.

Vivisectus · #4 02-20-2012, 08:09 PM

This is Irelandstan, my dear. We think cheques are newfangled. Paying for groceries by credit card here would be outlandish behavior. Debit cards are JUST becoming commonplace.

lisarea · #5 02-20-2012, 08:13 PM

You also have fairly strict privacy protections there. We don't have shit for that in the US.