Walmart Data Bentonville, Arkansas.
“Behind a fence topped with razor wire just off U.S. Highway 71 is a bunker of a building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won't even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement,”
Wal-Mart had enough storage capacity to contain twice the amount of all the data available on the Internet; or, roughly 460 terabytes of information.
“With 3,6000 stores in the United States and roughly 100 million customers walking through the doors each week, Wal-Mart has access to information about a broad slice of America - from individual Social Security and driver's license numbers to geographic proclivities for Mallomars, or lipsticks, or jugs of antifreeze.”
Why Walmart need to Data mining?
"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,"
"And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer."
Such knowledge, Wal-Mart has learned, is not only power. It is profit, too.
Over the years, she said, Wal-Mart executives have spent handsomely for their systems, paying $4 billion in 1991 to create Retail Link and signing onto innovations like bar codes and electronic data interchange, a forerunner of the Internet, well ahead of the pack.
Read more.
No comments:
Post a Comment