Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders
rogerdickey.com
rogerdickey.com
> Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time!
Funny to who? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying weight loss pills + loads of candy/sodas) could be fun I guess, but just cookies and rubber? Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about"
2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting
3. posted it anyway
I just like the taste better. :-/ but so many people have thought that was soooo funny.
Its not so much that the juxtaposition on its own is hilarious. You have to build a scenario. It's fun to imagine funny scenarios.
Is the cart for a person who wants to treat themselves and these are their priorities? Is it a very specific mating ritual?
It's a writing prompt for your imagination. In reality almost all of these are surely very mundane repurchases but that's not the point.
This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.
Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.
After all it’s training data would include a vast corpus of body-function humor, fart jokes, and very old supermarket shopping list jokes that are being tested here.
It implies SEX but without saying it out loud, haha, so funny, am I rite my fellow 16 year olds?
> Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
You don't get it, it's about the ASS. So funny!
Some people just remain adolescents.
It is more likely that the person purchasing adult diapers and baby food is the caregiver of an adult. Perhaps of themselves, or an aging parent, or their spouse who is recovering from surgery.
My mind went to "A fairly typical household where grandpa/grandma lives in the house and you also have at least one baby, or someone (maybe same grandpa/grandma) have troubles digesting food". Funny how different our casual links can be formed in our head :)
I guess GP and I are both actually part of that "terminally online" group they're complaining about.
Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal, per-household look.
Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.
The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
with play they surely gained much domain understanding and source of new ideas.
bad for company and society to enforce the oppressive conformity.
If you are happy, in the flushes of love, feeling safe, many things, even ordinary things will feel amusing, funny, worthy of a belly laugh. On the other hand if you are stressed, under pressure, depressed or angry, then not so much.
Often times I am very easily amused by the most prosaic things and I am not even stoned in anything of external chemical source. It feels good to be that way.
For example, I react very differently to Thurber based on my emotional state. Identical external stimulus, very different reaction.
Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart.
Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.
Depends on the store I'd wager. We have a store here (Ametller Origen) that sell things they cultivate/make themselves "nearby" (in the same region, and among other things they sell too) and sell in their own retail stores, I'm guessing most of their customers do indeed follow the habits of seasonality as lots of stuff isn't available outside of the seasons.
Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.
Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.
Prices also change over the year.
They're so large, watery, and tasteless, that I grow them myself or go without.
A lot of foods are no longer seasonal, as noted above, but I can't say I can taste the difference. Except for tomatoes and strawberries where I think I can - who knows, maybe I'm imagining it?
Strawberries again I never partically liked even home grown ones. Som modern ones are tasteless especially those available out of season.
> Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.
The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.
Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.
> Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.
Can't you just grab a bigger cluster/bunch and remove N bananas so it has the amount you want? Or remove 3 from the bunch that has five so two 5+2 clusters? Feels like I'm missing something obvious here.
(Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket.
Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)
I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn
the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.
Tampons and a self-help relationship type magazine, maybe?
Masks and toilet paper, so retro.
Wine, a spirit, and Wine and Spirits magazine.
When you are a cashier, customers make comments like this all the time, preemptively defending themselves to you for their "eccentric" purchases. Truthfully, as a cashier you are on auto pilot and scanning things as quickly as possible and trying to not make mistakes. We are a store that sells these items and I do not find it surprising or strange that you are buying any of them. The fact that you can buy condoms and apples here is what makes this market "super". It's my job, I'm here to sell it to you. Paper or plastic?
Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.
How is this the last thing in the article? The sole example given of a "funny" combination (apples and condoms, weirdly bad example) is only remotely funny because those are the only items.
Nothing wrong with giving up though, it's a hard problem for all the same reasons recommendation engines are.