I’m not sure if this particular story is true, but the spirit of it is.
At the time I was working for a marketing technology company who helped provide some of the predictive tech for Target and MANY other retailers (mostly grocery stores). I worked on the team that developed the predictions for the retailers. They were quite accurate because (in those naive and lax security days) the retailers would send us every transaction including the CC number used in the purchase. So the company could develop a pretty robust profile of purchases for a customer across multiple retailers. Fortunately all the company cared about at the time was predictive coupon printing. If you ever got a separate coupon printed with your receipt it was that company.
I first heard about this story from an IT class at community college-
I knew about data mining and collection it was well-known. Reading the story, the father goes to a local store to complain about something that corporate sent out and a store manager is forced to apologize. I think this happened in a low-education region -- this doesn't make a lot of sense.
It's a quaint sort of headline. By now we take it for granted that it must happen a hundred times a day. Someone shows up in the Target data warehouse buying or browsing maternity items a few weeks after having bought a pregnancy test. Before they've told some of the people in their life about the pregnancy.
This event was subject matter for the book "The Power Of Habit" by Charles Duhigg - demonstrating that you can learn a lot from peoples habits, even if they are only shopping habits. Quite an interesting story, which also discusses the father of advertising Claude C. Hopkins.
At the time I was working for a marketing technology company who helped provide some of the predictive tech for Target and MANY other retailers (mostly grocery stores). I worked on the team that developed the predictions for the retailers. They were quite accurate because (in those naive and lax security days) the retailers would send us every transaction including the CC number used in the purchase. So the company could develop a pretty robust profile of purchases for a customer across multiple retailers. Fortunately all the company cared about at the time was predictive coupon printing. If you ever got a separate coupon printed with your receipt it was that company.