idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” lol I think they forgot to realize this is incredibly unsettling and creepy
Companies have been targeting people with ads when they think they're the most vulnerable for ages. What's bold about this is how not at all subtle it is. "We know there's no food in your fridge. Order a pizza!" seems like something that should make people uncomfortable.
I find everything about this upsetting. This level of targeted manipulation should be illegal.
It seems like the only way to avoid it is to only shop in person and to stick to mom and pop stores that can’t afford to do all these shenanigans, while also avoiding ads like the plague.
That sounds like an area where someone can sell a device that scans for toxins/mold/etc. Put a sample, if the machine says "Bad" then throw away, if it says "OK", then hope it's not an Elizabeth Holmes-esque shithousery...
Do you realize all your posts are getting flagged because they are useless and uninteresting and nobody wants to read them or cares what you say? You do know that, right?
> All american fridges contain at least 20% expired condiments, by volume.
Refrigerators are generally sized between 300 and 500 liters. Are you suggesting that most (I won't even say all) refrigerators have 60 liters of expired condiments?
Is this a submarine article[1] by instacart to sell their consumers data? feels like a glowing review of the data. And why would papa jhons accept to be a part of this campaign?
This is absolutely an ad and you can bet Papa Johns signed off on it. Their Chief Marketing Officer provided quotes. Adexchanger is a site about ads made by an ad company (Access Intelligence, LLC).
Instacart users should be upset about their data being packaged up and sold. Or maybe there should be half-decent privacy laws that protect them. Otherwise you just get this corporate-orwellianism.
Anyways, I wonder if instacart can predict political affiliation. I bet their data scientists have at least tried.
> Instacart users should be upset about their data being packaged up and sold.
Instacart users should have been upset about that while reading Instacart's privacy policy prior to signing up and refused to use the service in the first place. Having their data being packaged up and sold was something every user already agreed to.
I believe we're at the point where living in modern society and dodging these abusive EULAs is nigh impossible.
Your credit card company, every merchant you interact with, even your employer's payroll processor all sell your data.
I guess if you work under the table cash only-jobs, only purchase items in-person, again cash only, and don't use any apps on your phone you are safe from corporate snooping?
> I believe we're at the point where living in modern society and dodging these abusive EULAs is nigh impossible.
You're not wrong but I can't help but wonder if we'd be at this at the point in modern society now if we'd been smart enough to avoid signing up for services that promised up front to be abusive long before the practice was so widespread and unavoidable. Instacart started 14 years ago. It wasn't an essential or unavoidable service. Why should corporations treat us any differently if we keep telling them that this abuse is acceptable to us and then reward them for it?
> There are two things Papa Johns doesn’t like to see
There are three things. Papa Johns also hates to see well compensated employees. They've been successfully sued multiple times for wage theft, they used “no-poach” agreements which prevented franchise owners from hiring workers from other Papa Johns restaurants in an effort to keep wages down, and they insisted that if they had to provide health insurance to their workers they'd pass that cost onto consumers rather than spend a penny of the $87 million in gross profit they were making.
He doesn't. I think you misread this passage (it's the only thing that comes close):
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
It's worth pointing out that there's no evidence that Colonel Sanders ever did that. It's not as if he was directly quoting someone. Schnatter was just spewing bullshit and threw out that slur without any reason for doing so.
The claim trying to be argued here was the he hated black people and your additional sources still do not back that up. The second article seems to instead provide evidence against that claim. In reality this event happened during peak wokenness where saying a slur no matter the context made you a bad person deserving of being cancelled.
Did we read the same source? The closest thing I saw in there to anything he said was:
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
Which, for the record, has never been documented at all. Conversely, his black chauffeur insisted (post-mortem) that his former employer was always respectful, and the only time he even mentioned race was to ask what 'you people want to be called.'
The conversation was pretty non-exciting: 'What people?' 'Um, colored folk.' 'We prefer to be called black.' 'Oh, okay...' End of chat.
Someone seeking out the most respectful language to use - the opposite of bigotry.
It's possible that black people are a fourth thing Papa Johns doesn't like to see, but even though their founder and CEO was casually throwing out the slur on a call he had with his marketing agency about the PR fallout of his previous comments complaining about NFL players exercising their right to protest police brutality during the national anthem, the official position of Papa Johns is that they condemn racism in all forms and they want to distance themselves from the endorsements the restaurant had received from white supremacists both before and after the slur came to light.
The assumption with that statement is that there is a net amount of money to be dispensed, and either a few highly compensated employees get those jobs or many low wage employees.
But the very fact of wage theft indicates that the employers want to keep more money in their hands, and distribute less of it. So it really just amounts to small numbers of underpaid jobs.
Most things experience higher demand when the clearing price is lower. I expect that jobs (or at least “labor hours”) would be firmly in this set.
The mechanism would be some business somewhere would have thousands of hours of tasks that were worth around $12/hr to the business. If the market wage was $15/hr, that work doesn’t get done. If the market wage is $8/hr, it gets done, at least to a much greater extent than in the $15/hr case.
I love Papa Johns and we get their pizza atleast twice a week. Never once did we have have a bad pizza or bad service. All the people i've meet there while picking up are happy and very customer service orientated.
> The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat.
What she means is that they want to do it subtly enough so people aren't creeped out, because when it's put like that it really is creepy.
This has been in the pipeline for a while now. This is an NYT article from 2012 talking about how Target were, well, targeting women they thought were pregnant based on their shopping habits because that's one of the few points in life when people's shopping habits are maleable: https://archive.is/CUo8O
I think there was a Frontline episode that covered this too. A father apparently called corporate, furious that they were sending his household so many baby related coupons when he had a young daughter at home.
It turned out his daughter was pregnant, and her purchases had triggered Target’s prediction model.
If I recall correctly, the corporate takeaway was that they realized they had to hide the targeted coupons among unrelated ones so customers wouldn’t get creeped out by how much the company appeared to know about them.
And that was years ago, before the level of tracking and institutional machinery we have now.
I'm just... Confused at how any of this is good for society. YOU FUCKING KNOW when your fridge is empty.
So OK maybe some corp can reprogram you to not restock on food. CONVINCE ME THAT'S GOOD. Is it not just an attempt to make people worse? Less self-sufficient? More miserable?
> Papa Johns’ “Empty Fridge” campaign ran from late April through last weekend on NBCU streaming supply such as Peacock, NBC Sports and NBCU content across streaming distributors. While it’s too soon to digest the results, Papa Johns knows what it’s looking for.
They have data for a full month. They know if it worked or not. They decided to make a positive press release despite it failing to increase sales.
Atul Gawande, of Checkslist Manifesto [0] fame, has a great article about the Cheesecake Factory [1].
He mentions that that they have a model that can predict both guest numbers and revenue:
“We have forecasting models based on historical data—the trend of the past six weeks and also the trend of the previous year,” Gordon told me. “The predictability of the business has become astounding.” The company has even learned how to make adjustments for the weather or for scheduled events like playoff games that keep people at home."
And this was in 2012!
I highly recommend both the book and the article as both talk, in detail, about how to build systems even in very dynamic environments.
I can only imagine how accurate the models have gotten now.
Instacart sells data to Papa Johns for better pizza ad timing.
Papa Johns isn’t somehow able to predict this based on their own data (which is the impression I initially got from the headline), they are buying it from Instacart.
66 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 73.7 ms ] threadIt seems like the only way to avoid it is to only shop in person and to stick to mom and pop stores that can’t afford to do all these shenanigans, while also avoiding ads like the plague.
Somebody at Heinz packaging department should be working on a ketchup syringe.
No AI needed though, so, not sexy...
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Anyways, I wonder if instacart can predict political affiliation. I bet their data scientists have at least tried.
My other thought is that companies like Papa John’s that make shitty products are most likely to engage in desperate growth tactics like this.
You know what helps tempt people into ordering pizza? Making good pizza.
The problem is that it’s cheaper to purchase analytics and serve an ad for “pizza” at the literal moment the viewer is out of groceries.
I wonder if their fancy analytics can also tell them how many of these customers regret not just buying groceries after they finish their Papa John’s.
Instacart users should have been upset about that while reading Instacart's privacy policy prior to signing up and refused to use the service in the first place. Having their data being packaged up and sold was something every user already agreed to.
Your credit card company, every merchant you interact with, even your employer's payroll processor all sell your data.
I guess if you work under the table cash only-jobs, only purchase items in-person, again cash only, and don't use any apps on your phone you are safe from corporate snooping?
You're not wrong but I can't help but wonder if we'd be at this at the point in modern society now if we'd been smart enough to avoid signing up for services that promised up front to be abusive long before the practice was so widespread and unavoidable. Instacart started 14 years ago. It wasn't an essential or unavoidable service. Why should corporations treat us any differently if we keep telling them that this abuse is acceptable to us and then reward them for it?
Instacart is now an ad-company. so as almost every company now.
ads are just too lucrative to pass up on if you sit on some rich data.
There are three things. Papa Johns also hates to see well compensated employees. They've been successfully sued multiple times for wage theft, they used “no-poach” agreements which prevented franchise owners from hiring workers from other Papa Johns restaurants in an effort to keep wages down, and they insisted that if they had to provide health insurance to their workers they'd pass that cost onto consumers rather than spend a penny of the $87 million in gross profit they were making.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44803163
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
As such, we can't really complain when people use acceptable words of the time.
Feel free to tell them that they're wrong.
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
The conversation was pretty non-exciting: 'What people?' 'Um, colored folk.' 'We prefer to be called black.' 'Oh, okay...' End of chat.
Someone seeking out the most respectful language to use - the opposite of bigotry.
BTW, why don’t we tax the bots for UBI?
The assumption with that statement is that there is a net amount of money to be dispensed, and either a few highly compensated employees get those jobs or many low wage employees.
But the very fact of wage theft indicates that the employers want to keep more money in their hands, and distribute less of it. So it really just amounts to small numbers of underpaid jobs.
Second one is I think what garnered downvotes, and said sincerely: TAX.THE.BOTS.FOR.UBI.NOW!
The mechanism would be some business somewhere would have thousands of hours of tasks that were worth around $12/hr to the business. If the market wage was $15/hr, that work doesn’t get done. If the market wage is $8/hr, it gets done, at least to a much greater extent than in the $15/hr case.
Whatever their formula is, it's working.
What she means is that they want to do it subtly enough so people aren't creeped out, because when it's put like that it really is creepy.
It turned out his daughter was pregnant, and her purchases had triggered Target’s prediction model.
If I recall correctly, the corporate takeaway was that they realized they had to hide the targeted coupons among unrelated ones so customers wouldn’t get creeped out by how much the company appeared to know about them.
And that was years ago, before the level of tracking and institutional machinery we have now.
So OK maybe some corp can reprogram you to not restock on food. CONVINCE ME THAT'S GOOD. Is it not just an attempt to make people worse? Less self-sufficient? More miserable?
They have data for a full month. They know if it worked or not. They decided to make a positive press release despite it failing to increase sales.
He mentions that that they have a model that can predict both guest numbers and revenue:
“We have forecasting models based on historical data—the trend of the past six weeks and also the trend of the previous year,” Gordon told me. “The predictability of the business has become astounding.” The company has even learned how to make adjustments for the weather or for scheduled events like playoff games that keep people at home."
And this was in 2012!
I highly recommend both the book and the article as both talk, in detail, about how to build systems even in very dynamic environments.
I can only imagine how accurate the models have gotten now.
0 - https://amzn.to/4y4Riot
1 - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/big-med
Instacart sells data to Papa Johns for better pizza ad timing.
Papa Johns isn’t somehow able to predict this based on their own data (which is the impression I initially got from the headline), they are buying it from Instacart.
Name and shame.