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 make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.
I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.
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.
Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.
I had an interesting conversation with my mom recently when she said don't buy apples. It isn't in season right now. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't even know apples had a season. I just bought the bag of gala apples without much thought to it.
> 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.
> 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 weight loss pills + loads of candy/sodas) could be fun I guess, but just cookies and rubber? Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
Nah, but sometimes a bit of thinking, reasoning and editing can make things funny, doesn't mean you need to create a thesis about it. But in my mind, just stating "Someone bought Oreos and lube in a store" isn't exactly the epitome of humor, maybe I'm just getting old.
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".
> but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something?
This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.
Why would an LLM make that mistake? It depends on why you went shopping. If you are blessed with a surplus of executive function, you can make a list and then get everything on that list when you go shopping. If you are not so privileged, you find yourself having to go to the store in pursuit of a specific mission. Get all the thinks to bake a cake for the birthday party that's to tonight, and don't get laundry detergent while you're there, even though you're running out.
Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.
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 :)
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.
Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness
involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal,
per-household look.
Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.
The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
Parsley is used by people who don't cook often as a garnish to make a meal look more fancy. The sort of thing you might do if you have a date coming over and want to impress...
I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn
the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.
All of them. Don't you know you're supposed to make fun of people that a "different" from you? Get with the program already. (/s if it wasn't already clear.)
Using LLM embedding cosine similarity to classify products into larger categories (bricks) wasn’t something I would’ve thought of. Last I heard of word vectors was back when word2vec came out, I guess in the back of my mind I knew LLMs have something similar and it makes sense that open weight models reveal that information easily.
This idea sounded like it had lots of humour potential. Unfortunately, if there is in fact humour to be found in this dataset, it appears to be beyond the reach of current data science techniques.
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 make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.
I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.
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.
Depends where you are. I am in Southern England.
Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.
Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.
Prices also change over the year.
I had an interesting conversation with my mom recently when she said don't buy apples. It isn't in season right now. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't even know apples had a season. I just bought the bag of gala apples without much thought to it.
> 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.
much more interesting than the actual article
> 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 weight loss pills + loads of candy/sodas) could be fun I guess, but just cookies and rubber? Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
here's how this likely went down:
1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about"
2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting
3. posted it anyway
The file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.
Yes! This is how you do humor. Demand precision. Dissect all the things!
Nah, but sometimes a bit of thinking, reasoning and editing can make things funny, doesn't mean you need to create a thesis about it. But in my mind, just stating "Someone bought Oreos and lube in a store" isn't exactly the epitome of humor, maybe I'm just getting old.
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".
> but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something?
This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.
Why would an LLM make that mistake? It depends on why you went shopping. If you are blessed with a surplus of executive function, you can make a list and then get everything on that list when you go shopping. If you are not so privileged, you find yourself having to go to the store in pursuit of a specific mission. Get all the thinks to bake a cake for the birthday party that's to tonight, and don't get laundry detergent while you're there, even though you're running out.
Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.
yeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me
I mean, I laughed. Soo...
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.
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.
> The parsley and condoms I don’t get
Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal, per-household look.
Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.
The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
Parsley is used by people who don't cook often as a garnish to make a meal look more fancy. The sort of thing you might do if you have a date coming over and want to impress...
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.)
> Counterexamples welcome.
I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn
the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.
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
Which one of these was supposed to be funny?
All of them. Don't you know you're supposed to make fun of people that a "different" from you? Get with the program already. (/s if it wasn't already clear.)
Using LLM embedding cosine similarity to classify products into larger categories (bricks) wasn’t something I would’ve thought of. Last I heard of word vectors was back when word2vec came out, I guess in the back of my mind I knew LLMs have something similar and it makes sense that open weight models reveal that information easily.
This idea sounded like it had lots of humour potential. Unfortunately, if there is in fact humour to be found in this dataset, it appears to be beyond the reach of current data science techniques.
search for peas and honey!
Reminds me of that time Netflix made fun of its customers that watched bad Christmas movies over and over. It's in poor taste.