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A comment on Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending America's supermarkets. Parent comment

Re:Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending Ame... by tylerhou on Friday May 17, 2019 @07:30PM (#19944556)
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?).
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Re:Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending Ame... by fjsolwmv on Friday May 17, 2019 @07:46PM (#19944643)
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...

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Re:Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending Ame... by thaumasiotes on Friday May 17, 2019 @08:37PM (#19944864)
> 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.)

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Re:Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is upending Ame... by tylerhou on Friday May 17, 2019 @08:53PM (#19944921)
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...

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