Blame Big Data for CVS's endless miles of receipts

Buy a single item at CVS and you can end up with a 4'-6'-long ribbon of register tape, a kind of orgy of coupons and come-ons.

The phenomenon of the farcically long CVS receipt goes back to 2008 or so, when the company started buying data-mining services to plumb its customer loyalty card data, generating coupons on the fly.

This apparently worked -- for a while. But stimulus regresses to the mean (AKA: we get used to stuff) and so CVS needed to do more to get the same yield, and other companies started printing their own super-long receipts, poisoning the well by getting us all more adapted to (and thus unimpressed by) the phenomenon.

Register coupons have a long and weird history. Getting a coupon into the hands of someone who is likely to use it is hard because most people won't use most coupons. Consumer packaged goods companies like Unilever and P&G have spent decades experimenting with getting grocers to hand coupons out to people who are cashing out, on the grounds that someone who is buying groceries has a high probability of being the kind of person who buys groceries. But the problem is, someone who has just bought groceries is also likely to be someone who won't need to buy groceries for a while.

There are lots of complicating factors here: the richer you are, the more willing you might be to try a new product (if you're poor and you buy a laundry detergent you don't end up liking, you can't necessarily afford to throw it away and go back to your old brand) -- but rich people are also less coupon-clippy, meaning that register coupons (intended to entice the purchaser into trying something new, because you don't need to convince someone to buy a product that they already routinely purchase) are more likely to go into their garbage than an envelope that is put aside for the next shopping trip. Read the rest