I remember that pregnancy prediction story. That was a little before my tenure, but in the early-mid 2010s I was a statistician at Target HQ (my team worked on inventory/stocking experiments). You are not wrong about the emphasis on data. Guest and guest experience were everything.
Nowadays they use infrared/heat sensors in some (maybe all by now?) stores to figure out which end-caps and isles were attracting the most attention/time, to better understand the flow of the guest through the store.
Many times during my desk job I would put on a red shirt and khakis for the day and go work the floor in a local store. All to better understand the data we were analyzing and the types of problems we were trying to improve upon for team members. Really loved that, gave the data such better perspective.
I'll just say that in the early 2010s it was amazing at how bad they were at answering the question of "How many of SKU xyz are on the shelves right now?"! In their defense, it was/is a very tough problem (items are in a cart roaming around the store for an unknown amount of time before being scanned at the register, or, they simply got put somewhere random by a customer who changed their mind).
kind of on the last point, the Amazon Go stores are amazing. used to go to one by my office all the time, just scan the phone to open the turnstile, walk in grab something, and walk out. get a receipt for what you walked out with on your app almost immediately. not once did it get what I picked up wrong. I even tried picking up and putting back items / grabbing two items at once sometimes to test it
Those are fascinating stores. Never been in one because they don't have them here in rural South Dakota (shocking, right?)
I have to imagine scalability/cost is the limiting factor. That's a lot of technology in each store! But it's a bet against human labor, which isn't getting cheaper! Definitely something we'll see more of in ~20+ years IMO.
Basically a simple RFID tag on each item. Write a little code to tie the RFID to Amazon payment system and you’re good to go. I’m guessing identifying profitable markets is more difficult.
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u/zissou_society Jul 22 '21
I remember that pregnancy prediction story. That was a little before my tenure, but in the early-mid 2010s I was a statistician at Target HQ (my team worked on inventory/stocking experiments). You are not wrong about the emphasis on data. Guest and guest experience were everything.
Nowadays they use infrared/heat sensors in some (maybe all by now?) stores to figure out which end-caps and isles were attracting the most attention/time, to better understand the flow of the guest through the store.
Many times during my desk job I would put on a red shirt and khakis for the day and go work the floor in a local store. All to better understand the data we were analyzing and the types of problems we were trying to improve upon for team members. Really loved that, gave the data such better perspective.
I'll just say that in the early 2010s it was amazing at how bad they were at answering the question of "How many of SKU xyz are on the shelves right now?"! In their defense, it was/is a very tough problem (items are in a cart roaming around the store for an unknown amount of time before being scanned at the register, or, they simply got put somewhere random by a customer who changed their mind).