
What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits (2004) - heinrichf
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/yourmoney/what-walmart-knows-about-customers-habits.html
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ardy42
> Three years ago, Wal-Mart summarily announced that it would no longer share
> its sales data with outside companies, like Information Resources Inc. and
> ACNielsen, which had paid Wal-Mart for the information and then sold it to
> other retailers.

Anyone have more information on these types of data feeds? What PII is usually
in them? They're an opaque, behind-the-scenes practice that I'd like to know
more about. Wal-Mart may not have given them anything for a decade, but I'm
sure tons of other retailers do.

~~~
spydum
Zero PII. On occasion there are loyalty programs and IDs but there is no link
back to the consumer. Companies like IRI and Nielsen recruit their own
panelists and build models of the consumer that they then project into census
style data.

~~~
verelo
Yeah, i don't know about that. There is a data feed I know of that contains
the last 4 credit card digits...

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stefs
> By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata
> mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in
> perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to
> experts.

~15 years later, 460TB are about 10.000 euros in cheap over-the-counter hard
disks.

or 70k € in SSDs.

~~~
ericpauley
I find this statistic dubious at best, given that by 2004 the internet had
hundreds of millions of users. Even if we're generous and assume they mean
public data on the internet, that'd be less than 1MB of data per person.

~~~
mattnewton
How many people were passive consumers then though? Also, hough much lighter
weight was the content? This is before smartphone videos were being uploaded
after all, 2004 was still an era where you might have a page on your personal
site for your dog and everything was static html + css.

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totallyashill
Hey guys! WM Associate here. Let me know if you have questions about our data
storage practices (or anything else).

I'm wanting to shed some light on our practices, as we aren't as sketch as
most believe.

Throw-away account for obvious reasosns.

~~~
badrabbit
Purchase data sharing with 3rd parties and facial recognition,how rampant are
they? And do you know anything about how they track cell phone's wifi mac as a
customer goes around the store?

~~~
totallyashill
Data Sharing Agreements: None that I know of. That bit is a little out of my
range.

Facial Recognition: Very, Very Little. Only in one store at the moment, and
it's designed for Asset Protection and tracking a thief around the store.

As for tracking MAC addresses, we track Enterprise devices that associates
use, but not customers.

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sjg007
Maybe it was an attempt to ward off Amazon, also Target.

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ramalama
Walmart has spent a shit ton of money on their analytics systems including
open source and Teradata. They have agreements with various cell companies for
geo-fenced info. So they have location analytics and your "market basket" data
to slice and dice. Yet the results are mediocre and Amazon is kicking their
ass with strategy. They have no loyalty program (Sam's has membership) to
provide compelling packaged deals to shoppers, they have their Every Day Low
Price pretense but check Neighborhood Market prices that vary wildly from
super-center prices especially for grocery. In reality, WMT is a quasi-
monopoly that is dying under its own obesity - it needs to split up. eCommerce
at $16B is a joke considering it doesnt make any profit and has take billions
in overpriced investment. The management, especially in tech, barely see
projects through and has lately removed several long-time employees for "fresh
blood". Add turnover in SV and other places, it is chaos.

~~~
totallyashill
This'll be fun to dissect.

> Walmart has spent a shit ton of money on their analytics systems including
> open source and Teradata.

This is true! More specifically, we're using Teradata and Hadoop.

> They have agreements with various cell companies for geo-fenced info.

First that I've hear of it. If we actually did have this, it would be a major
invasion of privacy. There was a pilot to be able to track expensive inventory
(Like TVs) around the store to prevent theft, but it was shutdown due to
privacy concerns.

> Yet the results are mediocre and Amazon is kicking their ass with strategy.

Go look at our year-over-year for e-commerce and you'll see that we're
actually doing very well.

> They have no loyalty program (Sam's has membership) to provide compelling
> packaged deals to shoppers, they have their Every Day Low Price pretense but
> check Neighborhood Market prices that vary wildly from super-center prices
> especially for grocery.

This is where it gets interesting. Most of the variation you'll see is taxes
from zone to zone. As well as logistical challenges for certain locations.
Given actual places, I could get a breakdown of costs, but alas.

> In reality, WMT is a quasi-monopoly that is dying under its own obesity - it
> needs to split up. eCommerce at $16B is a joke considering it doesnt make
> any profit and has take billions in overpriced investment.

Do you watch out our financial calls?

> The management, especially in tech, barely see projects through and has
> lately removed several long-time employees for "fresh blood". Add turnover
> in SV and other places, it is chaos.

Management is terrible, I'll agree to that. But HR isn't ageist, and we have
thousands of associates that are > 25 year tenure with Walmart and hundreds of
those over 35 year tenure.

Turnover in SV is because we meet the bare minimum to compete in the market,
not because of management, otherwise you'd see the similar numbers to our
offices in Reston, Virginia.

Thanks!

