No such thing as too much information

The NYT has a good piece on Wal-Mart's awe-inspiring usage of customer data.

A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart'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' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it.

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."

Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances. Most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly, the company said.

In case you don't get the scale of data it takes to do that:

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.

Some people (like my Peg-in-law) see this as a sign of the evil of the Wal-Mart beast. If you're in that camp, go read this Reason article. It might change your mind.

(I absolutely credit the Reason piece with sparking the chain of thought that led us to our advertising model.)

Even though Wal-Mart isn't handing out discounts for the information they gather, they are able to operate more efficiently, which means more of what people want; less of what they don't want and, in the end, net lower prices.

Look, even if you think that this makes George Orwell spin in his grave, the genie's out of the bottle. You can't put it back. So the only way to even things up for the mom n' pop retailer is to give them the same power.

That's exactly what we're going to do.