{"id":729,"date":"2004-11-15T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2004-11-15T00:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=729"},"modified":"2004-11-15T00:01:58","modified_gmt":"2004-11-15T00:01:58","slug":"data_mining_wal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=729","title":{"rendered":"Data Mining &#038; Wal-Mart"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics7.nytimes.com\/images\/2004\/11\/13\/business\/14wal.184.jpg\"><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/11\/14\/business\/yourmoney\/14wal.html?ex=1258174800&#038;en=660474d293ecab98&#038;ei=5088&#038;partner=rssnyt\">Constance L. Hays<\/a> takes a look at Wal-Marts massive customer\/product database.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>URRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida&#8217;s Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology.<br \/>\nA week ahead of the storm&#8217;s landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart&#8217;s chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes&#8217; worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart&#8217;s computer network, she felt that the company could &#8220;start predicting what&#8217;s going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen,&#8221; as she put it.<br \/>\nThe experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products &#8211; and not just the usual flashlights. &#8220;We didn&#8217;t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,&#8221; Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. &#8220;And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.&#8221;<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Constance L. Hays takes a look at Wal-Marts massive customer\/product database. URRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida&#8217;s Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}