Tag: big companies
In ‘Help Wanted,’ a Satirist of Literary Brooklyn Takes On the Big-Box Store
Probably all of us have been inside a place like Town Square location #1512, the fictional big-box store that provides the setting for Adelle Waldman’s new novel, Help Wanted. It’s the kind with colorful seasonal displays and wide aisles, the kind that in the ’80s and ’90s came to signify the peak of American commerce: the convenience of being able to buy baby food, a lawn mower, and a plastic Christmas tree all in one brightly lit, airplane-hangar-size space.
You Should Worry About the Data Retailers Collect About You
A man walks into a Minneapolis-area Target, angry about coupons his teenage daughter received for baby clothes and cribs. “Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” he asks a store manager. Except, his daughter really was pregnant. Target had tuned a marketing-prediction model so tightly that it could successfully tell what was happening inside her body, before even the girl’s family knew.
This story, relayed by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times in 2012, is one of