observed that e.g. /r/MegaLoungeV is a highly-active sub, which isn’t necessarily what you’d expect if the activity level was based
entirely upon the number of people permitted to have access.
I started wondering if there might be a better predictor of engagement levels. I experimented by looking at the ratio of how many people ‘subscribe’ to each MegaLounge to
how many people are permitted into there. This isn’t a perfect measure of engagement, of course, but my thinking was that of the people who are invited into a MegaLounge, only
some of those will add it to their front page… but that those who add it to their front page are more-likely to actively participate.
The graph shows three things. From the left axis, the blue and red lines show the number of people who are allowed into each MegaLounge and the number of people who are
subscribed to each MegaLounge. As you might expect, there’s a gap between the two and the gap narrows in higher lounges, where there are fewer people.
But what I was interested in is whether and where this gap changes proportionally: is the “subscription rate” among eligible people higher in particular lounges, and can this been seen
as a predictor of activity levels and engagement rates in each lounge? That’s what the green bars show (against the right-hand axis: note that it doesn’t start at zero). In general,
across the MegaLounges up to and including /r/MegaLoungeSol, there does seem to be a slight upward trend: i.e. the higher a
lounge you’re in, the more-likely that eligible people are to add that lounge to their front page. Beyond /r/MegaLoungeSol the bars
jump around all over the place, probably because of the small number of people ‘up there’, and I suggest that we ignore them: accuracy of this as a predictor would be expected to be
better where there were more subscribers: say, up to about /r/MegaLoungeDiamond.
What this would predict would be a “lull” at /r/MegaLoungeVIII. I don’t know if that’s your experience or not. And, interestingly,
the ‘subscription ratio’ at /r/MegaLoungeV and /r/MegaLoungeX are also unusually
low, bucking the overall trend. What does this mean? I don’t know. But if /r/MegaLoungeV really is to be considered one of
the more “active” MegaLounges, then I think that we can safely say that my hypothesis – that we might be able to predict activity hotspots by looking at the subscription rate – is not
backed up by the data.
It’s been almost five years since Sainsbury’s supermarkets pioneered the “brand match” idea, which rivals Tesco and Asda later adopted into their own schemes, and I maintain that it’s
one of the cleverest pieces of marketing that I’ve ever seen. In case you’ve not come across it before, the principle is this: if your shopping would have been cheaper at one of their
major competitors, these supermarkets will give you a voucher for the difference right there at the checkout. Properly advertised (e.g. not in ways that get banned for being misleading), these schemes are an
incredibly-compelling tool: no consumer should say no to getting the best possible prices without having to shop around, right?
This voucher implies that I’d have saved 62p by shopping elsewhere. But that’s not the whole story.
But it’s nowhere near as simple as that. For a start, the terms and conditions (Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco) put
significant limitations on how the schemes work. You need to buy at least a certain number of items (8 at Asda, 10 at the other two). Those items must be directly-comparable to
competitors’ items: which basically means that only branded products count, but even among them, the competitor must stock the exact same size or else it doesn’t count, even if it would
have been cheaper to buy two half-sized products there. There are upper limits to the value of the vouchers (usually £10) and the number that you can use per transaction or per month.
“Buy X get Y free” offers are excluded. And there’s a huge list of not-compared products which may include batteries, toys, DVDs, some alcoholic drinks, cosmetics, homeware, flowers,
baby formula, light bulbs, books, and anything (even non-medicines) from the pharmacy aisle.
A whole 11p off my next shop? That’s absolutely worth me carrying this piece of paper around in my wallet and trying not to lose it for a week.
But even if it only applies to some of your shopping – the stuff that’s easy to directly compare – it’s still a good deal, right? You’re getting money back towards what you
would have saved if you’d have gone up the road? Not necessarily. Let us assume that on average the prices of these three supermarket giants are pretty much the same.
Individual products might each be a little more expensive here and a little cheaper there, but if you buy a large enough trolley-load you’re not going to notice the difference.
Following me so far? What does this mean for the voucher: it means that it no longer remotely represents what you would have saved if you’d actually been “shopping around”. Let’s take a
concrete example:
A typical basket at any one of these supermarkets will, on average, come to about the same price… even if individual items vary wildly.
Suppose that this is my somewhat-eccentric shopping list (I wanted to select a variety of comparable branded products), and I’m considering shopping at either Sainsbury’s or Tesco:
Mozzarella
Fish fingers
Clover spread
Whole milk
Crunch corner yoghurts
Fromage frais
Cadbury Mini Rolls
Frozen chips
Frozen petit pois
Goodfella’s deep pan pizza
Dough balls
Chocolate-dipped flapjacks
Dry white wine
Bagels
Multigrain wraps
Red Bull multipack
Angel Slices
Cheerios
Windolene
Cornettos
Not too unreasonable, right? I’ve made a spreadsheet showing my
working, where you’ll see today’s prices for each of these items (along with the actual brands and package sizes I’ve selected), if you’d like to check my maths, because here comes
the clever bit.
These products don’t count as comparable. And personally, I’m not sure that “basics”-range coleslaw is likely to even count as ‘food’.
Based on my calculation, taking my imaginary shopping list to Sainsbury’s will ultimately cost me £52.85. Taking it to Tesco will cost me £54.13. Pretty close, right, and I’m not likely to care about
the difference because Tesco would give me a £1.28 voucher off my next shop which makes up for the difference (note that Sainsbury’s wouldn’t reciprocate in kind if it were the other
way around, after a policy change they made late last year). But that’s not
actually a true representation of the value of ‘shopping around’. As my spreadsheet shows, if I were to buy each item on my list at the supermarket that was cheapest, it’d only cost me
a total of £43.75: that’s a saving of £9.10 (or about 17% off my entire shop) compared to the cheapest of these supermarkets. These schemes don’t give you a
real “best of all worlds”. Instead, they give you, at most, a “best of all worlds, assuming that you’re still going to be lazy enough to only shop in one place”.
When you’re buying this much shopping, you’re unlikely to want to go to two different supermarkets to do it, however much money it might save you.
If you’re particularly devious of mind, you can exploit this. For example, suppose I went to Tesco but when I reached the checkout I split my shopping into two transactions.
The first transaction contains the frozen goods, milk, wine, dough balls, flapjacks, and mini rolls. This comes out at £33.73, which is £10.38 more than Sainsbury’s would charge me for the same goods. Tesco therefore gives me a £10 voucher, which I
immediately use on the second batch of shopping: the one which contains goods that are cheaper than their Sainsbury’s equivalents. The total price of my shopping:
£44.13 – only 38p more than if I’d gone to both supermarkets and bought only the best-value
goods from each (the 38p discrepancy comes from the fact that Tesco won’t ever give you a voucher worth more than £10, no matter how much you’re losing out).
“I’d like to run these through as two transactions, please.”
It’s not even that hard to do. Obviously, somebody’s probably written an app for it, but even if you’re just doing it by guesswork you can get a better result than just piling all of
your shopping onto the conveyor belt together. Simply put the things which seem like a good deal (all of the discounted products, plus anything that feels like it’s good value) at one
end of your trolley, and unload those things last. Making sure that you’ve got at least ten items on the conveyor, ‘split’ your shopping somewhere towards the beginning of
these items. Then take any voucher you get from your first load, and apply it to the second.
It’s pretty easy, so long as you don’t mind looking like a bit of a tool at the checkout.
Well that makes it all worthwhile then, doesn’t it?
But to most people, most of the time, this is nothing more than a strong and compelling piece of marketing. Either you get reminded that you allegedly “saved money”, on a piece of paper
that probably goes into your wallet and helps to combat buyer’s remorse, or else we get told that we paid a particular
amount more than we needed to, and are offered the difference back so long as we return to the same store within the next fortnight. Either way, the supermarket wins your loyalty, which
– for a couple of pence on each transaction (assuming that the customer doesn’t lose the voucher or otherwise fail to get an opportunity to use it) – is a miniscule price to pay.
Rediscovered this cache while leading a party on their first geocaching expedition. The new container and hiding place are a huge improvement, but the description and hint are now
inaccurate! For the benefit of anybody as lost as we were: you’re not looking for a magnetic nano, and if you go for the hint: it’s not going to be at the height that you might expect!
Hopefully CO will update the page for this otherwise excellent cache!
Found this one when it was in its old location, but revisited today while introducing a group of folks from the University to the sport. Like the new container, but the old hiding place
was better IMHO! No sign of either TB.
Performed maintenance on behalf of CO. Cache is now back in place after a recent muggling. And until the fresh summer
growth come through, it should be slightly easier to find than previously owing to reduced vegetation in the area! Ready to go live again!
Apparently when I had wisdom teeth removed, ooh, a little over 25 years ago, the dentist who did so fucked up and managed to leave fragments of tooth embedded in my gum, which might
have been harmless except that they’ve lately become infected with something and are may ultimately threaten my jawbone.
So, yeah. In about 15 minutes I’m off into surgery. Local anaesthetic (though I’m wondering if I should have opted for general… gulp!), then some digging around in my gums to pull out
some pieces of tooth shrapnel: nice, eh?
Wish me luck, Masons!
Update: Went swimmingly! Minimal pain/discomfort, lovely surgery staff. A++ would thingy again. Which is for the best, because I’ve got a slightly more-complex
(related) procedure on the other side of my mouth in five weeks or so!
You know how I love to play with statistics and data mining. Well, I’ve been doing so, and I thought I’d share with you uber-elites some fun-but-pointless data I’ve been extracting:
the names of the Redditors who’d probably most-benefit from MegaMegaMonitor, but who aren’t using it (based on how many tracked private subs they’re part of – note that some
subs are tracked but don’t [yet] have icons…):
I wonder if I should have some kind of referrals scheme, whereby people can claim credit for getting other people ‘hooked’ on MegaMegaMonitor. Or maybe just have a scoreboard of “who
suggested it to whom”.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it all again.
Anyway: just wanted to share with you. I’m thinking of doing some statistics cross-referencing “highest MegaLounge” against “number of (tracked) private sub memberships”, because I’ll
bet there’s a correlation there… and if there is, I’d be interested to see who the outliers are! /u/k_princess would probably be one, as she’s in
lots of private subs but is only up to /r/MegaLoungeSaturn, somehow. /u/outroversion even more so, with a
highest MegaLounge of /r/MegaLoungeRuby. But there’s always a lot we can learn from the outliers. And there must be outliers at the other extreme, too:
people who are way up in the MegaLounges but aren’t in many other private subs: I wonder who they are?
This has been your insight into my mind, for today. Have a great week!
You’ll be able to see your ninja brethren everywhere on Reddit: they’ll have a “ninja” icon after their name, so you can’t miss them!
You’ll be able to write secret messages that only other ninjas (who use MegaMegaMonitor) will be able to decode. A great way to “out” suspected pirates when you meet them
elsewhere in Reddit and to coordinate attacks.
If you choose, you can go into your MegaMegaMonitor settings and take off your ninja disguise! If you do this, even pirates (who use MegaMegaMonitor) will be able to see
that you’re a ninja by the icon next to your name, so it’s only an option for ninjas who prefer an aggressive stance rather than a stealthy one. It’s up to you!
The pirates are about to make this same discovery, too, but (on account of me being a ninja!) you’re hearing about it first. To arms!
