It should be no surprise that retailers track what you buy so they can send you coupons for those items, or, as creepy as it is, that they buy data about your ethnicity, political beliefs, job history and more.
But how about employing statisticians and researchers to figure out if a customer is pregnant, and if so, estimating her due date based on some 25 products she’s bought?
That’s what Target does, according to this New York Times Magazine story, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” They do it with so much success that they had figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before she’d told her parents and started mailing her coupons for maternity clothing and nursery furniture.
Here’s an excerpt from the NYT story about how Target’s statistician, Andrew Pole, developed a formula for figuring out if a woman is expecting:
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.
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.
Does it make you uncomfortable that retailers want to know everything about you? Or do you expect that given technology and the volume of personal information we put online?