How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did
Last edited Fri Feb 17, 2012, 02:14 PM - Edit history (1)
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.
Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — about the clues to a customer’s impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. From the NYT:
Or have a rather nasty infection…
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
And perhaps that it’s a boy based on the color of that rug?
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:
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
(Nice customer service, Target.)
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Makes it easier to budget that way anyway 
That's Sam Drucker, who ran the General Store in Green Acres.
Or this guy:
Sam the Butcher from the Brady Bunch.
The way this used to work is that retailers knew who you were, what you were up to, and what things you might be interested in.
It was called "personal service".
The problem is that personal connection doesn't scale without automation. But you can bet that Sam Drucker had a pretty good idea when every woman in Green Acres was having their period and what products they liked to use for that, so he'd know what to stock, how much, and to remember to point out to his customers when he'd gotten a shipment at a reduced price of something they'd probably want.
That's precisely what retailers have always done.
(which I only do about once a year or so)
and then the store gives me Gerber baby product coupons everytime I check out for the next three months!
Yup, me too. 
She did most of her shopping at a local "mom and pop" market, so they knew her by name. One day, as she bought yet more baby food, as she'd done for years, the "pop" owner of the store finally asked, "How old is your baby, Mrs. xxxxxx?" That's when he found out who she was really shopping for... 
