Dig deeper, the truth behind beer diapers

The article analyzes the real case of the beer diaper story. Is there any data to support this widely circulated story in reality? What are the process and results of applying it to real cases? Let's follow the author to find out.

The song "Little Garden Digs" has been very popular recently. I'd also like to dig into the truth behind those widely circulated stories in the data field. Today, I'll talk about the story of beer diapers .

1. Story Review

If you are a Chinese , you must have heard the story of Dayu controlling floods . If you are a data person, you must have heard the story of beer and diapers . Beer and diapers are the enlightenment stories of many data people when they enter the industry. Many people may be attracted to become data people because of this story.

Beer Diapers tells this story.

It was an article published in Harvard Business Review in 1998, claiming that Wal-Mart cashiers were surprised to find that customers always had beer and diapers in their shopping carts when they checked out. After investigation, it was found that there were several characteristics of this phenomenon: first, in terms of time, the frequency of buying diapers and drinking beer on weekends was higher than on weekdays; second, in terms of age, the children in the family were no more than two years old; third, they liked to watch sports programs, and they watched them while drinking beer; finally, American sports programs were mostly concentrated on weekends.

So, when young mothers need to change diapers for their children on weekends, they usually ask the dad who is watching the game to buy them. When the dad goes out to buy diapers, he will bring back a bottle of beer. Later, Walmart will put diapers and beer together, and the sales of both will increase.

This story is well known in China. It is influenced by Tu Zipei's big data bestseller "Top of Data". After that, it has become a must-have case in almost all books on association rules, data mining, and big data.

This story is perfect as an enlightenment story. It is impactful, has an analytical process, and has business results, which is very impressive.

2. Something is wrong

But do you think there is something wrong with this story? If this case is true, why have you never seen supermarkets displaying it like this? Even in the United States, no supermarket does this.

In addition, for such a successful business case, I have never seen a single photo . Not even a single one! There is no shelf display, no receipts, no customer checking out with beer and diapers, etc. This is too abnormal.

Moreover, this enlightenment story in the field of data is presented in the form of a story in all major data books and articles. The time, place, and characters of the story are not clear. A classic case about data, but there is no data at all. Don’t you think it’s strange?

3. The real version

Not only do we have doubts, but Americans themselves also think it is wrong. Daniel J. Power , a professor of information systems and management at the College of Business Administration at the University of Northern Iowa, wrote an article that comprehensively and logically reveals the origin of this story (the original text can be found at http://www.dssresources.com/newsletters/66.php)

According to Daniel J. Power, the supermarket chain that sells beer diapers is not Wal-Mart, but another supermarket called Osco Drugs. This is a pharmacy and convenience store brand mainly distributed in the Midwest of the United States. This company started working on data mining projects in 1992 and is considered a pioneer in data mining.

At that time, the project collected information from more than 12 million shopping carts from 25 branches. Through data analysis, some patterns were indeed found: between 5pm and 7pm, customers bought beer and diapers together. However, no correlation was determined for age or gender.

The company's management expressed interest in this discovery, but did not redesign the merchandise display or bundle beer and diapers for sale, but simply emphasized that more beer and diapers should be placed during this time of day.

So the real story behind this is:

1. It is true that some people have been found to buy beer and diapers together at a certain time.
2. Are the people who buy it because they want to be a dad? Not sure.
3. Did you put beer next to the diaper? No.

So this case did have a prototype, but the current version of the story greatly embellishes this case.

4. Who compiled it?

So who was responsible for the emergence of this story? Let's think about who is the biggest beneficiary of the spread of this story?

A data practitioner.

This story has made more people realize the potential of mining business value from data, and has made more companies increase their investment in data. It can even be said that this story has accelerated the advent of the big data era. Wu Gansha, chief engineer of Intel China Research Institute, revealed the answer in a report: the "beer and diapers" story was made up by a manager of Teradata.

I think Wu Gansha is not someone who needs to rely on traffic to package himself, and there is no need to gain traffic by refuting this story. It is very likely that this statement is true.

Teradata is one of the world's largest providers of big data analysis, data warehousing and integrated marketing management solutions.

This identity is very reasonable, it is definitely a werewolf.

I think the Teradata manager must have wanted to emphasize the importance of data in front of the client company, so he processed the case. This story must have helped him win a lot of orders.

5. Conclusion

Although the beer diaper story is not true, the good news is that the value of data to business is real. We data people can still keep our jobs.

However, in February 2023, Teradata withdrew from the Chinese market. I don't know if it deceived itself.

Author: Jason

Source: WeChat public account "Sanyuan Variance (ID: sanyuanfangcha)"