NEW YORK—There’s some guy at the world headquarters of CVS drugstores screwing with me.
I don’t know who he is yet, but he lives in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. This is where CVS Health, the largest drugstore chainin the history of drugstores, has its main offices, and where a designated marketing jerk chews on the nub of a pencil and thinks all day about how many coupons he can string onto the bottom of my sales receipt.
I was thinking about this recently while having three hot dogs and a Dr. Pepper during the time it took to print out my receipt for two 6-ounce cans of Gillette Fusion ProGlide Two-in-One Shave Gel and Alpine Clean Skin Care. Why two cans of shave gel when one can is likely to last six months? And why the shave gel that has skin-care ingredients for a man who’s more likely to stick his head into a bowling-ball polisher than apply moisturizer to his face?
Because I had a coupon!
It was one of those faded, crinkly, jagged-edge coupons from a previous receipt, the kind that looks like a Peruvian lottery ticket that’s been laundered in your jeans pocket, but it clearly stated that if I purchased the Gillette Fusion ProGlide Two-in-One Shave Gel and Alpine Clean Skin Care instead of the more plebeian Gillette Foamy Original Shaving Cream (the word “original” inserted into the name to indicate that the only thing it does is make it possible to shave hair off your face), I would end up with a 25 percent discount since, if you did the math, the lower price of the GFOSC would be offset by the half-off-on-the-second-can of GFPTIOSGAACSC.
Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion
And so, of course, I did the math. I spent, probably, a full minute doing the math and staring at the truly baffling array of “Men’s Skin Care” products on a four-tiered shelving platform about fifteen yards long. There were, in fact, at least 40 different kinds of shaving cream, about half of them designated for “sensitive skin” (is the nation going through a psoriasis epidemic or something?) and many of them sounding so gay that I realized I must be shopping in one of the LGBTQ branches of CVS. Honeybee Gardens Herbal Aftershave for Men, anyone? How about Moon Maid Botanical ProAndro Men’s Wild Yam Cream? I don’t know what it is, or where you put it on your body, but I’m guessing it’s similar to smearing sweet potatoes on your private parts.
The reason it now takes four days to check out at CVS involves two recent drugstore developments. The first is that a guy in Woonsocket is profiling my purchasing behavior in order to figure out the last time I bought Mucinex, factor into that an algorithm that predicts the average number of cough, cold, and flu days for a man who also regularly buys the bargain-size bag of Jack Link’s Teriyaki Beef Jerky, then combine it with seasonal factors like the usual late-summer outbreak of canker sores in the Greater New York metropolitan area due to barbecue spices applied to undercooked beef at party houses on Fire Island. At some point during the computer analysis of my erratic micro-behavior and the macroeconomic presumptions about my demographic group (White Guys Who Never Buy Greeting Cards), a little digitized Electronic Midget (I picture him wearing a fedora, like an FBI agent from the ’30s) suddenly erupts and says, “Get a load of this!”
The get-a-load-of-this moment comes when the computer has discovered some counterintuitive knowledge about consumer purchasing behavior that only CVS knows. Since CVS is a $154 billion company—bigger than AT&T, to use one convenient example—they know that (a) my shaving-cream can has just sputtered and died, (b) I’m a sucker for multi-can shaving-cream deals, and (c) I’m a candidate for earwax removal. See, it’s this third thing that CVS knows and nobody else does. Because my Big Data file is being regularly reviewed by 28-year-old marketing girls from the Wharton School of Finance who keep their Hermès purses in a home safe, and then my future buying choices are printed out in the form of paper receipts so long they have to be wound onto wooden dowels like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I look at the receipt and—bingo!—I think, “Wow, I wonder if I have earwax buildup. I think I’ll check out this Eustachian-tube cleanser over in the aisle where they sell back braces and geriatric meal-replacement fruit drinks.”
In other words, CVS has invaded my brain.
