Funny Item Co-occurrences in 3.2 Million Instacart Orders
Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders
I analyzed 3.2 million Instacart orders to find the strangest grocery combinations that make cashiers snicker. After realizing raw product data was too granular, I mapped items to GS1 Global Product Classification bricks using embeddings and an LLM. This approach revealed surprising pairings with the lowest statistical lift, uncovering the most unexpected shopping cart contents.
The kind of shopping cart that makes the cashier snicker and later tell his friends, 'Dude, can you believe this guy came in and only bought condoms and apples?'
- embedding-shape
> 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?
- disillusioned
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.
- akoboldfrying
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.
- amelius
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.)
- brendanfinan
Which one of these was supposed to be funny?