Comment by sh1mmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sh1mmer | Hacker News Reader

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Some background: I worked on some Tesco online projects, I have friends who have worked on their data mining. I'm British but I now live in California.

Tesco's data mining is easily the biggest operation I've ever seen. Everything I did at Tesco had a large clubcard component. The clubcard was one of Tesco's major innovations in Britain. It's not dissimilar to a Safeway card. Tesco issue these things in keyfobs as well as card so you always have them.

I've seen people use their clubcard when they buy a newspaper. They don't save money, they don't even get points, it's just habitual.

You can tell Tesco have really nailed data when you see their customer demographic. I saw something in the Guardian (British newspaper) a couple of years back which showed the Tesco customer wealth demographics matching the population norm almost exactly.

When a retail group can organise their stores and retail inventory such that every walk of life uses them they are on the road to success. Most people I know in Britain that don't shop at a Tesco as their primary store have competing store much closer to where they live.

I worked on the checkouts in a Tesco one summer. The number of times I must have said "Have you got a clubcard?" — you're supposed to always ask the customer if they haven't already produced one. I think it's to get people who don't have one to get one just to shut up the assistant.

The scary part was (at least a few years ago when I had something to do with another Tesco-branded site) that they took one pound in every eight of all retail in the UK.

Not as scary, though, as the fact that they were taking one in every FOUR pounds spent online.

Those cards are annoying. I don't understand why they are necessary. Don't most people use the same credit card anyway?

Some people pay with cash or check.

I don't think anywhere much accepts cheques in the UK any more. Perhaps some shops, but it's unusual. Worst offenders are probably students paying for drinks by cheque.

Maybe their super data mining computer will eventually tell them to avoid running out of croissants every single day before 9 AM at my local Tesco...

This is actually the thing that makes me wonder about all the data mining Walmart is supposed to be doing. If I buy a lot of something, shouldn't that mean that they'll be more likely to have it in stock, all else equal? Assuming that their data mining is actually working, I mean. With croissants, I can see where there might be physical issues (not enough capacity for baking them in the store or something), and not enough lost sales to justify the additional cost of rectifying it. However, for things like 2-liter bottles or 12-packs of cans, it's hard for me to understand why their software would allow them to routinely run out, every week, at about the same time. It seems like multiplying a single value in a database somewhere by just over one would fix this problem, but it just keeps happening, week after week, for years.

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