Of Charles Duhigg's Essay 'How Companies Learn Your Secrets'
503 Words3 Pages
In his essay, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” Charles Duhigg elucidates that shopping is habitual. As a result, companies actually devote a lot of energy into “understanding…personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them” (135). Target and Febreze are the two examples that Duhigg utilizes to explain his point. Target uses the information that they collect and buy to, for example, “assign each shopper a ‘pregnancy prediction’ score” (144). Febreze “piggybacked on existing habits” in order to design effective advertisements (147). These are just two examples of companies that take advantage of habits in order to make a larger profit. Although I do not shop very much, the shopping that I do is quite habitual. However, since I rarely go shopping, I do not find myself to be a “particularly valuable target for retailers” (149).…show more content… When I was in high school, I would take the bus home about once a week. On these occasions, I usually splurged on some ice cream or a smoothie while I waited for the bus. It became almost second nature for me to walk right past the bus stop towards the town green. Now that I am in college, a very similar food habit is forming. I have swim practice on Fridays, after which I have been going to Quickly, a bubble tea store. I have a three hour break on Tuesdays, during which I have been setting aside time to go the cafeteria and buy food. Although the buying of food is essentially the only purchase I make, it is definitely based on