When the New York Times writes about what WM knows about it's customers (~80% of you), it gets a lot of attention. Other papers will show for free the full text of the article much longer:
A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it.A small town general store owner knew a lot more about his customers' purchases than WM ever will. To damnpen WM's understanding of your consumer habits, you could just pay with cash; all they'll know is that somebody bought it... a level of privacy you could never have in a general store.The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products - and not just the usual flashlights.
"We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Dillman said. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer."
Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 to Wal-Marts in the path of Frances, and most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly.
Such knowledge, Wal-Mart has learned, is not only power. It is profit too.
Plenty of retailers collect data about their stores and their shoppers, and many use the information to try to improve sales, but Wal-Mart amasses more data about the products it sells and its shoppers' buying habits than any other company, so much so that some privacy advocates worry about potential for abuse.
Posted by Kevin on November, 15 2004 at 02:51 PM
