Mike Rosing[SMTP:eresrch@eskimo.com] wrote:

On Wed, 1 Jan 2003, Todd Boyle wrote:

...

Its not enough to put the chips next to the beer. They want to examining the layout of all their shelf space. The cash register data alone, is enough to do this, but it doesn't work very well for shoppers who come and buy chips on tuesday and beer on wednesday. The card lets them associate your whole shopping cart for the month.

It's a nice idea, but they have several people on one card. When my kids are teenagers, they'll have the same card I and my wife have. So they have whole families in that data mix. I'd think they would try to correlate the cash register data with each person - the kids are in the candy corner, the dad is getting the beer and mom is getting the chips. Doesn't seem like a very simple problem to me!

Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike

Actually, many stores go to a lot of trouble to find a pessimal arrangement of items - the more shelves a customer walks past, the more impulse buys he/she is likely to make. There's a reason the dairy section is usually the furthest from the door. At Shaw's (one of our local chains) using the courtesy card can sometimes lead to quite substantial savings - 50% on some items such as meats. At times, my overall grocery bill has been cut 20% by using a card. Peter Trei