> 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 purchase at gas stations and convenience stores.
This was from a friend who worked adjacent predictive analytics for Prime Fresh, who was complaining to me about how frustrating bananas were to account for, but how they can't just exclude them because if you're not able to cover a substantial enough portion of the consumer's shop, then you're not doing their job, and they end up in a supermarket to complete the shop anyway, and you lose sales you would've otherwise had.
Where can I find and read more things like this?