Safeway's use of data is comically bad.

Since 2010 or so, I've been signed up for their Just4U special discounts, based on what they know about my shopping habits, as a California dad. Recently they offered me a bonus coupon for Pampers diapers.

Not a match! Our kids have been out of diapers since the days when BlackBerry was the coolest phone in town. Maybe longer. I'm not impulse-buying diapers for anyone else's kids.

They let a week go by and then offered me a special deal on Depends, the old-people's diapers. Not in my current need list either.

Another week goes by, and they come up with a third idea. This time it's a discount coupon for Kotex sanitary napkins.

Hello? They've got about nine years of regular shopping data on me. If they still make multi-decade errors in identifying my age -- and can't get my gender right -- their data department hasn't even made it into the abacus era.

Hopefully it's not this again: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

..what data department?

Well as for sanitary napkins they may have assumed that if you have kids, you have a wife.

Wrt to depends, maybe their algo gradient descends on natural language first? This guy doesn’t need kids diapers anymore, lets try something less specific.

Why do you assume that retail companies are not looking at data already? Target was (in)famously able to predict that a teenager was pregnant before she herself knew based on her shopping habits. It's entirely possible that retail companies are already following a close to optimal strategy (don't sell too many items at such a low price because they're a loss leader?).

That's not what happened, and you should reflect on what made you think such an absurd claim is true.

Target noticed she was pregnant before her father noticed.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

> That's not what happened, and you should reflect on what made you think such an absurd claim is true.

OK, that's not what happened, but I don't see why you're calling the claim absurd. It is unusual-but-routine for women to present with health complaints that are caused by their own pregnancy, without necessarily having realized they were pregnant. Sometimes that health complaint is "I'm in labor". (To get to that point, you have to be really fat, but it does happen.)

Sorry -- I misremembered the story. But as another commenter notes, it's routine for women to not know they are pregnant [0]. So my claim is not "absurd", and I don't feel any need to "reflect" on my actions. The patronization is not necessary.

The main intent of my anecdote is to show how retail companies are already analyzing data. And I think it's foolish to assume that we (i.e. people working directly in tech) know better than the people who are working in tech + retail. (Many retail stores are on the technical bleeding edge - Target spins up K8 clusters in each store [1]!)

[0] https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/can-you-be-pregnant-not-... [1] https://tech.target.com/infrastructure/2018/06/20/enter-unim...