Are You Buying What I’m Buying
I’ve been doing some online shopping lately, and more often than you’d think, while I’m browsing the virtual aisles, God nudges me and points to the screen. Sometimes it’s good for a chuckle, sometimes it’s a little scary, but most of the time it’s just, “huh?”
What she’s pointing at is that most famous of online shopping tools, “customers who bought this also bought…”
I don’t have any really good examples to share with you, but if you ever want to see how widely tastes vary while still managing some overlap, just spend some time looking at that section of the page. Sure there’s plenty of common sense examples, if you buy a slow cooker it makes sense to buy a book of recipes, for instance. What surprises me most is how often the direct competition shows up on the list. I mean, does someone buying a beard trimmer really buy two different brands? Or is that just marketing masquerading as mass consumption?
But the fun ones are when products that don’t even come from the same family tree show up; then you get to make up little stories. Perhaps the buyers of toenail clippers also buy plastic freezer bags because they save their clippings and need to keep them fresh. Maybe the people that bought both Russian and Israeli gas masks think that each country tunes their masks for different mixes of chemical agents. Or maybe they’re like trading cards, and they just want to get the whole set.
It’s like having an everchanging set of those, “which of these things is not like the others” tests. Fun for the whole family.
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