What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits (2004)

&gt; Three years ago, Wal-Mart summarily announced that it would no longer share its sales data with outside companies, like Information Resources Inc. and ACNielsen, which had paid Wal-Mart for the information and then sold it to other retailers.<p>Anyone have more information on these types of data feeds? What PII is usually in them? They&#x27;re an opaque, behind-the-scenes practice that I&#x27;d like to know more about. Wal-Mart may not have given them anything for a decade, but I&#x27;m sure tons of other retailers do.

&gt; 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.<p>~15 years later, 460TB are about 10.000 euros in cheap over-the-counter hard disks.<p>or 70k € in SSDs.

Hey guys! WM Associate here. Let me know if you have questions about our data storage practices (or anything else).<p>I&#x27;m wanting to shed some light on our practices, as we aren&#x27;t as sketch as most believe.<p>Throw-away account for obvious reasosns.

Maybe it was an attempt to ward off Amazon, also Target.

Walmart has spent a shit ton of money on their analytics systems including open source and Teradata. They have agreements with various cell companies for geo-fenced info. So they have location analytics and your &quot;market basket&quot; data to slice and dice. Yet the results are mediocre and Amazon is kicking their ass with strategy. They have no loyalty program (Sam&#x27;s has membership) to provide compelling packaged deals to shoppers, they have their Every Day Low Price pretense but check Neighborhood Market prices that vary wildly from super-center prices especially for grocery. In reality, WMT is a quasi-monopoly that is dying under its own obesity - it needs to split up. eCommerce at $16B is a joke considering it doesnt make any profit and has take billions in overpriced investment. The management, especially in tech, barely see projects through and has lately removed several long-time employees for &quot;fresh blood&quot;. Add turnover in SV and other places, it is chaos.