How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

[Robb]

FORBES -- Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.

(snip)

Pole 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.

(snip)

So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote — so good that it sounds made up — that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”.....

Read More: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

[MineralMan]

1. Fascinating. So, even pregnancy can be

detected by shopping trends. Poor dad, though. Helluva way to find out his kid has been fooling around and got pregnant.

Data mining is getting more and more sophisticated. A little scary, too.

[Zalatix]

2. Perhaps we should start cross-buying.

You buy my food at Target, I buy your pregnancy supplies or whatnot.

Completely friggin' confuse the system.

[Iggo]

16. I'm in!

[Initech]

20. I like it!

[Earth_First]

3. This is outright frightening...

Between this and the information that folks are willing to send across the globe via social networking outlets, it's getting a little scary.

[RZM]

10. It's no scarier than 'Moneyball'

It's essentially the same thing. Crunching the numbers every which way in order to discover patterns.

[PA Democrat]

4. That is creepy. I knew that some stores did this when

you used their store discount card (a local grocery chain requires that you enroll in their program to get their "sale" prices), but Target is doing this to customers buying online or using a debit/ credit card.

What is troubling is how this information could be used if shared with insurance companies, potential employers, etc. Think about it. They could track your purchases of fatty foods, alcohol, cigarettes, over the counter and prescription drugs.

[izquierdista]

5. Use cash

And those store discount cards usually have an alternate way to identify yourself (like your telephone number). One of these days, Kroger is going to be very disappointed to find out that all those friends and relatives of mine, not only are they NOT shopping at my local Kroger's, they haven't been here in years.

[Robb]

6. In your case, actual identity is probably irrelevant.

It's just some buyer they can keep track of with a number, and target with whatever they can -- even if it's a coupon printed on the back of a receipt.

[Liberal_in_LA]

7. wow. creepy

[AtomicKitten]

14. yes it is

[Liberal_in_LA]

18. it's even a little creepy when I buy groceries and cat coupons are printed with my receipt.

I haven't bought cat food THAT day but using my Ralphs discount card allows them to know I have bought cat food in the past. what a database they must have.

[Ratty]

8. I pay by cash almost exclusively nowdays

I get it from the ATM at the beginning and middle of each month. It's *primarily* to help me keep track of my spending (and it works, BTW), but I don't want some nameless entity keeping track of what I buy, selling it to my insurance company, tying it into my web browsing habits - plus a whole host of misuses we know nothing about. I have one of those Safeway cards too because the savings are too much to ignore, but even that's tied to a fake name.

[JVS]

9. Cash is king.

[Chiyo-chichi]

11. Here's the NYT Magazine piece that is the basis for this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp

It's long, but a good read.

"The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions."

"This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies. "

[renate]

19. that was super interesting!

True, it's a long read, but a good one, as you said. Not only is the data mining stuff fascinating, the article has some useful information about how to change habits. Thank you!

[LibertyLover]

12. The data miners have a fit about my house

My husband and I are in our late 50s, so we get lots of stuff from AARP and retirement communities and financial planning for retirement, heck even stuff on funeral preparations. But --- we also have a 9 year old daughter, so we also get lots of stuff from American Girl and ToysRUs. It's an amusing mix sometimes.

[itsrobert]

17. My 15 yo daughter got an AARP solicitation

I wonder what that means?

[magical thyme]

13. creepy...not just what they're doing, but their response to the article

I have never even set foot into a Target and now I never will.

Thank goodness Hannafords has not got this data mining thing mastered. I've shopped there for years. The coupons that occasionally print with my receipts are rarely for anything I've ever heard of, ever buy, often for stuff the local store doesn't even carry Same with the weekly fliers .

On the other hand, their overall local campaign -- to offer as much locally grown produce as possible -- works well with me and I suspect others in this area. Phew!

[uppityperson]

15. Rec'd because I hate stores tracking individual's purchases. I am Ima Shopper at many places

phone number (local area code) 555-1212. It gets me low prices at gas pumps also since a lot of people use the same number. The number is for information.