I can imagine that one reason is that you also need customers to be able to find things, which is difficult when not sorted into some meaningful categories. That said, I think at the Target near me the beer and the diapers are relatively close.

Actually you want customers to not be able to find things, so they have to wander around, and 'find' other things (in large displays for example) that you want them to buy. If the beer and diapers are always together then they won't discover the new high-margin sausage rolls. So what's better for the customer from a correlated data perspective may not be better for the business from a maximizing profit perspective.

Taken to the extreme though, I'm going to be taking up employee time asking where something is and eventually stop shopping at a store if it's too frustrating.

a) most people don't take things to extremes; b) employee time is not a problem, as they're there anyway; c) if all grocery stores act like this (and they do), you have to keep shopping there anyway (and they know this).

So what will actually happen, with you and me and everyone else, is that we'll grumble about how they moved the cheese again, we'll wander around the store until we find it, and we'll be exposed to some more products and implicit advertising in our search, and we'll forget about it as soon as we exit the store. Over time the store will increase its profits 1.3%, and the competing store "where everything is always in the same place as last time" struggles because their prices aren't maximally optimized with the same grocery store software everyone else uses.

Eh. I have several grocery stores--and grocery departments--that I more or less favor for various reasons depending on what I'm buying. If one of them makes my life less pleasant whether because they're always moving stuff around, they overly rely on self-service, they tend to be crowded, or whatever--I'll probably go elsewhere. I do consider pricing but I don't really comparison shop so that only loosely factors in.

> you want customers to not be able to find things, so they have to wander around, and 'find' other thing

This seems to be the Loblaw/NoFrills model in Toronto. They relocate products with alarming frequency.

Want milk? That's in the dairy section. Want organic milk? That's in the health food section at the opposite end of the aircraft hangar sized store. Nuts? Either in the snack foods, health foods, or baking ingredients depending on unknown critera - one literally has to check all the places.

To be clear, the linked article debunks the whole thing. The correlationa were largely apocryphal, spurious, or useless.

That's not quite what the article says. Although it doesn't explicitly say so, there was apparently a (possibly valid) correlation. But Osco didn't act on it, instead removing a bunch of slow-moving SKUs instead.

Though that also makes the point that making things easier for customers to find is probably more important than any minor co-purchase optimizations.

I think there have been more recent fads. (If fad is the word for it.) There was the story about Walmart stocking up on Pop-Tarts during hurricane season that was in the news fifteen or twenty years ago.

There was the original "Big Data" and Hadoop, Chris Anderson's "The End of Theory" and Clive Humby coining "data is the new oil" around the same time. Probably others.