Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

https://rogerdickey.com/funny-item-co-occurrences-in-3-million-instacart-orders/

by rogerdickey • 7 days ago

52 92 7 days ago

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?

archerx• 5 days ago

The kale and enema one makes sense, they get so much fiber they get blocked up and need an enema. The parsley and condoms I don’t get but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. Oreo’s and lube I don’t get, it could be the absurdity that has the writer thinking it’s funny.

jll29• 5 days ago

The parsley and condoms I don’t get

Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal, per-household look.

Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.

The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.

onion2k• 5 days ago

Parsley is used by people who don't cook often as a garnish to make a meal look more fancy. The sort of thing you might do if you have a date coming over and want to impress...

thomascountz• 5 days ago

Baby food is often just puréed fruits and vegetables. Adult diapers are only funny if you've never considered that being able-bodied is temporary.

It is more likely that the person purchasing adult diapers and baby food is the caregiver of an adult. Perhaps of themselves, or an aging parent, or their spouse who is recovering from surgery.

embedding-shape8• 5 days ago

but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”.

My mind went to "A fairly typical household where grandpa/grandma lives in the house and you also have at least one baby, or someone (maybe same grandpa/grandma) have troubles digesting food". Funny how different our casual links can be formed in our head :)

nkrisc2• 4 days ago

Baby food and adult diapers sounds more like someone suffering from some kind of gastrointestinal illness, not something funny. Or perhaps more likely, a woman with a young baby who is still suffering from pelvic issues related to pregnancy and childbirth.

LilBytes• 5 days ago

I mean, I laughed. Soo...

Hnrobert42• 5 days ago

Yes! This is how you do humor. Demand precision. Dissect all the things!

embedding-shape8• 5 days ago

Nah, but sometimes a bit of thinking, reasoning and editing can make things funny, doesn't mean you need to create a thesis about it. But in my mind, just stating "Someone bought Oreos and lube in a store" isn't exactly the epitome of humor, maybe I'm just getting old.

fragmede2• 5 days ago

It's "funny" because sex is taboo in puritanical cultures like the US. Obviously you're not going to use the lube on the Oreo's, but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something? It's unexpected and the mind laughs, even though theres a perfectly normal explanation that doesn't involve those two things being together. Same for adult diapers and baby food. They have an elderly parent and a baby in the house, but the terminally online brain jumps to "it's a weird sex thing".

embedding-shape8• 5 days ago

but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something?

This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.

breezybottom2• 5 days ago

Sex is about as normal and pervasive in American culture as it is anywhere. Have you never watched HBO?

mritchie712• 5 days ago

here's how this likely went down:

1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about"

2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting

3. posted it anyway

stephantul• 5 days ago

The file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.

andy992• 4 days ago

They did it interactively with Claude, it’s possible that it played up the significance and humor of the findings in a way that the interaction left the user feeling like they were really on to something.

duzer65657• 4 days ago

scanned through pretty much the entire post. Still waiting for the funny part.

zem3• 5 days ago

yeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me

lukewarm707• 5 days ago

i enjoyed the author sense of play and enthusiasm.

with play they surely gained much domain understanding and source of new ideas.

bad for company and society to enforce the oppressive conformity.

speedgoose• 4 days ago

Having to wear adult diapers after giving birth is not unexpected.

fecal_henge2• 4 days ago

Nor funny.

tclancy• 4 days ago

Similar reaction. After reading the previous piece, https://rogerdickey.com/in-defense-of-996/, I am left wondering if this is just a very clever bot.

neonstatic• 4 days ago

Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube?

It implies SEX but without saying it out loud, haha, so funny, am I rite my fellow 16 year olds?

Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?

You don't get it, it's about the ASS. So funny!

Some people just remain adolescents.

jayd163• 4 days ago

Have you ever played Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples?

Its not so much that the juxtaposition on its own is hilarious. You have to build a scenario. It's fun to imagine funny scenarios.

Is the cart for a person who wants to treat themselves and these are their priorities? Is it a very specific mating ritual?

It's a writing prompt for your imagination. In reality almost all of these are surely very mundane repurchases but that's not the point.

disillusioned• 5 days ago

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.

anonu• 5 days ago

Berries are most certainly not seasonal anymore. They should be but we thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them. They're always on the shelf. Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Probably something that can be found in this dataset as well.

embedding-shape8• 5 days ago

Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore?

Depends on the store I'd wager. We have a store here (Ametller Origen) that sell things they cultivate/make themselves "nearby" (in the same region, and among other things they sell too) and sell in their own retail stores, I'm guessing most of their customers do indeed follow the habits of seasonality as lots of stuff isn't available outside of the seasons.

jkahrs595• 5 days ago

The pricing of berries are certainly seasonal. Bananas are cheap year-round.

pasc1878• 5 days ago

Depends where you are. I am in Southern England.

Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.

Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.

Prices also change over the year.

StilesCrisis• 5 days ago

We absolutely buy berries (and tomatoes) when in season. The flavor is much better!

01284a7e• 5 days ago

They are highly seasonal. We have not "thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them".

malfist3• 4 days ago

Available year round and seasonal isn't an oxymoron. Something can be both. Just look at potatoes, we learned a long time ago how to store them. Doesn't mean there isn't a time in the fall with they're the freshest and cheapest.

DaedalusII• 5 days ago

much more interesting than the actual article

hbcdbff• 5 days ago

I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.

breezybottom2• 5 days ago

No.

trebligdivad2• 5 days ago

The initial grouping of 'pack of organic bananas' with individual bananas feels like a wrong number in the pack problem; eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.

embedding-shape8• 4 days ago

eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.

Can't you just grab a bigger cluster/bunch and remove N bananas so it has the amount you want? Or remove 3 from the bunch that has five so two 5+2 clusters? Feels like I'm missing something obvious here.

xg152• 4 days ago

I imagine people either buy single bananas as a quick snack or bananas in bulk for breakfast. (Ignoring the "funny" uses here). I wonder if this kind of irregular pattern is a reflection on people's breakfast habits.

rpdillon• 4 days ago

When I worked on recommendation systems 15 years ago, I learned about the "banana problem", where bananas are so commonly purchased, they tend to be the top recommendation regardless of other foods in your cart. The solution, of course, was to bias for less commonly purchased items, but it was my first run-in with the weird statistics around banana purchasing patterns.

smelendez• 4 days ago

Very interesting!

Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.

The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.

Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.

Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.

Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.

linsomniac• 4 days ago

This comment is WAY more interesting than the article it is a comment on.

estetlinus• 4 days ago

It is the only fruit that requires no washing before consuming. And also, it makes my tummy hard.

brendanfinan• 5 days ago

Which one of these was supposed to be funny?

callmeal• 5 days ago

All of them. Don't you know you're supposed to make fun of people that a "different" from you? Get with the program already. (/s if it wasn't already clear.)

darwinwhy• 5 days ago

Using LLM embedding cosine similarity to classify products into larger categories (bricks) wasn’t something I would’ve thought of. Last I heard of word vectors was back when word2vec came out, I guess in the back of my mind I knew LLMs have something similar and it makes sense that open weight models reveal that information easily.

thrance• 5 days ago

Reminds me of that time Netflix made fun of its customers that watched bad Christmas movies over and over. It's in poor taste.

amelius• 5 days ago

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.)

lionkor2• 5 days ago

Some combinations could be funny, like a pregnancy test and something really mundane but odd like a whole pineapple and a large bag of lettuce

malfist3• 4 days ago

Why would that be funny?

jayd163• 4 days ago

Pregnancy test and a blue marker.

zem3• 5 days ago

Counterexamples welcome.

I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn

the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.

manwe150• 4 days ago

A few I’ve seen in person are someone buying about a dozen pallets of water and a half dozen of a vegetable (it was cabbage or leek if I recall). But that was more about the absurd looking quantity while only wanting just those two items. I assume most of the “funny orders” I see are restaurant owners who already got most of their items delivered, which makes them a large deviation from the expected family purchaser. This is something I have only seen at specific stores (similar to costco) in specific cities.

fwipsy• 4 days ago

Counterexample: https://xkcd.com/236/

victor9000• 4 days ago

Baby Food, Adult Diapers

jayd163• 4 days ago

Garlic and wooden gardening stakes.

Tampons and a self-help relationship type magazine, maybe?

Masks and toilet paper, so retro.

Wine, a spirit, and Wine and Spirits magazine.

akoboldfrying• 5 days ago

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.

zem3• 5 days ago

search for peas and honey!

card_zero• 4 days ago

I wish they didn't know this. I wish all the stores could agree to mind their own business and sell their products ingenuously, in blissful unawareness of what any customer buys alongside what other thing, instead of following us around taking notes.

xg152• 4 days ago

Are there any "funny" combinations in that list that don't involve toilet humor?

jyounker3• 4 days ago

Are there things in that list that involve toilet humor and are funny?

fecal_henge2• 4 days ago

Here is a likely scenario for the baby food/ adult diapers combo: Someone who suffered so much damage during childbirth that they are still struggling with their bowels by the time their baby is on solids. Hilarious!

Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.

esafak• 4 days ago

Analyzing substitutes and complements was a mainstay of data scientists 10-20 years ago. Too mundane to mention now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_rule_learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_analysis

pluralmonad• 4 days ago

I like to think I have a sense of humor, but if this is funny, maybe I don't.

jyounker3• 4 days ago

You have nothing to worry about.

armchairhacker• 4 days ago

"Banana" and "Extra Fancy Unsalted Mixed Nuts" only occurred once? They go together.

NDlurker• 4 days ago

Where is the comedy?

jaredandrews• 4 days ago

The other day I was idly wondering what are the strangest combinations of items people buy at grocery stores. 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?"

When you are a cashier, customers make comments like this all the time, preemptively defending themselves to you for their "eccentric" purchases. Truthfully, as a cashier you are on auto pilot and scanning things as quickly as possible and trying to not make mistakes. We are a store that sells these items and I do not find it surprising or strange that you are buying any of them. The fact that you can buy condoms and apples here is what makes this market "super". It's my job, I'm here to sell it to you. Paper or plastic?

wildfireday22• 4 days ago

Different experience at small town independent grocers that greet their regular customers by name and are summoned with a bell.

furyofantares• 4 days ago

Once you get to the LLM judging them, you've given up, and might as well just prompt the LLM to make up funny item co-occurrences.

Nothing wrong with giving up though, it's a hard problem for all the same reasons recommendation engines are.

jorams• 4 days ago

So what happens if we look only at small carts, where the entire order is just 2 or 3 items?

How is this the last thing in the article? The sole example given of a "funny" combination (apples and condoms, weirdly bad example) is only remotely funny because those are the only items.

jyounker3• 4 days ago

What a lame article. Even I can do better: one cucumber, vaseline, and a box of ultra-thin condoms.

kaikai2• 4 days ago

The AI still can’t understand that Armenian cucumbers should have a MUCH higher potential humor value than milk.

Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

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