With Hurricane Frances on its way, Wal-Mart’s IT department reviewed the data from when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. They made some interesting discoveries. From What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits:
The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products — and not just the usual flashlights. ‘We didn’t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,’ Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. ‘And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.’
The folks at Wal-Mart collect a lot of data:
By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.
The Internet when?
Anyway, we’re supposed to be terribly scared of all this data mining. (Hat tip to Dynamist Blog.)