Delivery aggregators are moving customer data away from the retailer, who now has less knowledge about his customer. Ever since data collection and analysis became cheap (with cloud-based on-demand web servers and MapReduce), there have been attempts to collect as much data as possible and use it to do better business. I must admit to…
Categorisation and tagging
Tagging offers an efficient method to both searching and for identifying customer preferences on the axis most appropriate for the customer The traditional way to organise a retail catalogue is by means of hierarchical categorisation. If you’re selling clothes, for example, you first divide it into men’s and women’s, then into formal and casual, and…
Would you want a free membership card?
Last weekend I was at Cafe Coffee Day on MG Road, waiting to meet a prospective client, when one of the store staff walked up to me with a card. “This is a free loyalty card, Sir”, he said, going on to tell me that if I were to buy three coffees using the card…
Barista Update
The Barista at Barton Center on MG Road has suddenly become so much more bearable, as they have turned down the volume of their music to a level such that you can actually have conversation without shouting. On a related note, it seems much easier to find tables there compared to earlier (yesterday we walked…
Orange Juice and Petrol
So I was reading this article by Ajay Shah about administered pricing for petroleum. He does an excellent (though it gets a bit technical in terms of statistics) analysis about what could go wrong if the government were to free pricing of petroleum products. He mostly argues in favour of deregulation, and that is a…
Shopping in New York
When I went shopping in New York on Friday I was reminded of this article by Tim Harford that the bofi had posted as part of a comment on one of my earlier posts. The basic insight in the article (which draws upon some widely cited research – I’ve read about it in several other…
Bangalore Book Festival
So today I made my way to Gayatri Vihar in the Palace Grounds to visit the Bangalore Book Festival, on its last day. It was interesting, though a bit crowded (what would you expect on the last day of an exhibition? and that too, when it’s a Sunday?). I didn’t buy much (just picked up…
The Loot
So I executed the book binge yesterday. In two phases – first at the “main” Landmark at the Forum and then at the “other” Landmark at Swagath Garuda Mall. Technically the binge is incomplete since I still have another Rs.600 to spend but it’s unlikely I’ll be spending that off soon, so for all practical…
Opportunity Costs
The concept of opportunity costs seems to be non-trivial, in the sense that most people don’t seem to get it. When I first learnt it as part of my Economics course at IIT Madras, I thought it was fairly common sense. However, looking around at a variety of people, it doesn’t seem to be that…
Discounting at megamart
Megamart (the discount chain run by Arvind Brands) has a really weird discount policy. Usually, the discounting mechanism that clothing stores follow is progressive discounting – the more you buy the more discount you get. In fact, even Megamart was following this practice a few months back. “Buy one get 20% off; buy two and…
Protect The Chain, But At What Cost?
Recently the West? Bengal State Marketing Board chairman Naren Chatterjee had to say this about Metro?s entry into the state, ?have heard that they will sell directly to the trade then what will happen to the people in the chain, they will become jobless. We will not allow any one who disturbs the chain.? Similar…