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Was this the essay you were referring to [1]? I think you’re bang on with this comparison. My dad and I have long complained how (for example) grocery stores se

Was this the essay you were referring to [1]? I think you’re bang on with this comparison. My dad and I have long complained how (for example) grocery stores seem to constantly cancel our favourite products. We know it’s not the manufacturer because the product is still on their website. My dad and I even have a term for the people in the head office who make the decision to phase out our favourite products: spreadsheet guys. It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

lsaferite 6y ago
Number driven vs. people driven is how I usually delineate these things. I find myself strongly in the people driven camp and dealing with purely numbers driven people is highly frustrating.
taneq 6y ago
Hmm. I feel like there's a spiritual connection between your spreadsheet guys and the apocryphal product expert at Campbell's Soups or wherever that tried to focus-test "the perfect soup" that would optimize sales. In the story, they realized that there's no one "perfect soup" and they had to create different varieties. Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
  - taneq 6y ago
    That's probably their thinking, but unless their aggregates include all of the other products that each customer who buys an item also buys (which it should, they have the data thanks to fly-buys schemes) they can't properly assess the overall impact of a given product. As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That's a fair point. But I'd imagine it's a multi-step process. Step 1: group products into families, like "milk" or "ketchup". Step 2: optimize shelf space with whatever rules you have applied to product families. Within a product family, pick the N best-selling products. The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.
hibikir 6y ago
Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are: Having 8 kinds of lemon yogurt, each someone's favorite, while disposing of the products past the expiration date leads to either some of the highest prices in town, or closing down. Profitability in very small supermarket chains is small. Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists. Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
- _jal 6y ago
  There is always a reason. My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back. I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc. But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
- chongli 6y ago
  Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom. I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.
dooglius 6y ago
Sounds like the two of you may be "harbinger customers", the interesting economic phenomenon of people who tend to like products that flop.
- jbay808 6y ago
  That's exactly me! The reason I know that everyone else has bad taste is because all of my favourite products end up failing in the marketplace and getting pulled off the shelves. - Sent from my Xperia Compact
  - simpss 6y ago
    oh god, I just broke my last xperia compact that stayed with me for years(x compact) and it's impossible to find something small again, not even getting into android updates and a cleanish android experience. well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  Damn, am I a harbinger customer? I loved my Motorola Droid, Droid 4, and Droid Turbo, none of which saw nearly the success of the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies. I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures. FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  I've heard of that term before. But when looking at [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.

lsaferite 6y ago

Number driven vs. people driven is how I usually delineate these things. I find myself strongly in the people driven camp and dealing with purely numbers driven people is highly frustrating.

taneq 6y ago

Hmm. I feel like there's a spiritual connection between your spreadsheet guys and the apocryphal product expert at Campbell's Soups or wherever that tried to focus-test "the perfect soup" that would optimize sales. In the story, they realized that there's no one "perfect soup" and they had to create different varieties. Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
- taneq 6y ago
  That's probably their thinking, but unless their aggregates include all of the other products that each customer who buys an item also buys (which it should, they have the data thanks to fly-buys schemes) they can't properly assess the overall impact of a given product. As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    That's a fair point. But I'd imagine it's a multi-step process. Step 1: group products into families, like "milk" or "ketchup". Step 2: optimize shelf space with whatever rules you have applied to product families. Within a product family, pick the N best-selling products. The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.

hibikir 6y ago

Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are: Having 8 kinds of lemon yogurt, each someone's favorite, while disposing of the products past the expiration date leads to either some of the highest prices in town, or closing down. Profitability in very small supermarket chains is small. Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists. Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.

_jal 6y ago
There is always a reason. My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back. I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc. But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
chongli 6y ago
Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom. I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.

dooglius 6y ago

Sounds like the two of you may be "harbinger customers", the interesting economic phenomenon of people who tend to like products that flop.

jbay808 6y ago
That's exactly me! The reason I know that everyone else has bad taste is because all of my favourite products end up failing in the marketplace and getting pulled off the shelves. - Sent from my Xperia Compact
- simpss 6y ago
  oh god, I just broke my last xperia compact that stayed with me for years(x compact) and it's impossible to find something small again, not even getting into android updates and a cleanish android experience. well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
Damn, am I a harbinger customer? I loved my Motorola Droid, Droid 4, and Droid Turbo, none of which saw nearly the success of the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies. I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures. FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
I've heard of that term before. But when looking at [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.