Re:Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @05:37PM
(#24633318)
> Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket.
I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
Re:Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads
by taneq on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @11:14PM
(#24635358)
That's probably their thinking, but unless their aggregates include all of the other products that each customer who buys an item also buys (which it should, they have the data thanks to fly-buys schemes) they can't properly assess the overall impact of a given product.
As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
Re:Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads
by TeMPOraL on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @12:54PM
(#24640842)
That's a fair point. But I'd imagine it's a multi-step process. Step 1: group products into families, like "milk" or "ketchup". Step 2: optimize shelf space with whatever rules you have applied to product families. Within a product family, pick the N best-selling products.
The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.
Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)