Anyone in data collection?

Are you collecting data about data collectors?

The first rule of data collection is . . . .

Yeah that’s for checking the against whatever database the computer is using.

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Is someone at each company weighing each individual item in the store?

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Doubt it.

Probably an approximation from a database of averages.

These are the kinds of questions that keep me awake at night.

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The store has a system where all the information is entered for each item. That includes upc, weight, dimensions, etc.

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Correct, which is how they can accurately keep up with quantity and stock.

Wal Mart was one of the first major stores to start a database for all this information and it gave them a huge boost in effeciency, which basically put K-Mart down.

If the legwork has been done correctly, the amount of data they're collecting is incredible.

I'm in the middle of a user analytics project at my company. Basically, I've created about 40 work assignments that go to different modules within our product suite. Within that module, I'm giving direction on what data to capture. For example, the user clicked "run", upon the run button being clicked, capture the following:

1. Filter options selected
2. Row volume based off of filter options
3. Count of run clicks in general
4. Count if run clicks by this user
5. Uniqueness of query (completely different project)
6. Capture a heat map displaying where the users cursor is located during this query execution for 10 second (I'll overlay all users cursor maps to find insights into what they're doing immediately after their query)

This is just 1 example. There's 40 different modules all with slightly different questions we're interested in.

This insights enables us to spend on pieces that the user gives a shite about, and ditch pieces the users never touch.

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I work in data for a top 10 insurance company.

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How long before insurance companies start looking at your credit card purchases? I can imagine health insurance companies would love to know how often someone goes out to eat.

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The thing that really prompted the question was it seemed the bagging area knew the weight of each product. Is someone at each company weighing each individual item in the store?

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Don't know about grocery, but before I went back to school I worked receiving/inventory in a warehouse at an electronics manufacturing company for a few years. Our shipping side was moving to voice pick, and for it to be efficient enough to outweigh the costs to implement it, we had to have dimensions for every single product in the warehouse. I spent months on an order picker with a list of our SKUs measuring dimensions of boxes, master cartons, and individual items. It was a fricking pain in the arse. I went back to school and left the company before we were finished.