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Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

rogerdickey.com

11–20 of 103 posts

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#11
post #6

Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post: Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to…

Berries are most certainly not seasonal anymore. They should be but we thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them. They're always on the shelf. Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Probably something that can be found in this dataset as well.

> Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore?

Depends on the store I'd wager. We have a store here (Ametller Origen) that sell things they cultivate/make themselves "nearby" (in the same region, and among other things they sell too) and sell in their own retail stores, I'm guessing most of their customers do indeed follow the habits of seasonality as lots of stuff isn't available outside of the seasons.

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#12
post #4

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

The kale and enema one makes sense, they get so much fiber they get blocked up and need an enema. The parsley and condoms I don’t get but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. Oreo’s and lube I don’t get, it could be the absurdity that has the writer thinking it’s funny.

Baby food is often just puréed fruits and vegetables. Adult diapers are only funny if you've never considered that being able-bodied is temporary.

It is more likely that the person purchasing adult diapers and baby food is the caregiver of an adult. Perhaps of themselves, or an aging parent, or their spouse who is recovering from surgery.

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#13
post #4

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

The kale and enema one makes sense, they get so much fiber they get blocked up and need an enema. The parsley and condoms I don’t get but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. Oreo’s and lube I don’t get, it could be the absurdity that has the writer thinking it’s funny.

> but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”.

My mind went to "A fairly typical household where grandpa/grandma lives in the house and you also have at least one baby, or someone (maybe same grandpa/grandma) have troubles digesting food". Funny how different our casual links can be formed in our head :)

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#15
post #6

Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post: Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to…

Berries are most certainly not seasonal anymore. They should be but we thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them. They're always on the shelf. Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Probably something that can be found in this dataset as well.

The pricing of berries are certainly seasonal. Bananas are cheap year-round.

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kale and enema one makes sense, they get so much fiber they get blocked up and need an enema. The parsley and condoms I don’t get but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. Oreo’s and lube I don’t get, it could be the absurdity that has the writer thinking it’s funny.

> but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. My mind went to "A fairly typical household where grandpa/grandma lives in the house and you also have at least one baby, or someone (maybe same grandpa/grandma) have troubles digesting food". Funny how different our casual links can be formed in our head :)

I admit I had the same thought as GP, though without the unnecessary kink-shaming.

I guess GP and I are both actually part of that "terminally online" group they're complaining about.

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#18
post #16

My conclusion: there's nothing funny about groceries, no matter how you order them. Counterexamples welcome. (Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket. Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)

Some combinations could be funny, like a pregnancy test and something really mundane but odd like a whole pineapple and a large bag of lettuce

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#19

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

Yes! This is how you do humor. Demand precision. Dissect all the things!

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#20

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

It's "funny" because sex is taboo in puritanical cultures like the US. Obviously you're not going to use the lube on the Oreo's, but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something? It's unexpected and the mind laughs, even though theres a perfectly normal explanation that doesn't involve those two things being together. Same for adult diapers and baby food. They have an elderly parent and a baby in the house, but the terminally online brain jumps to "it's a weird sex thing".
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