NYT: How Companies Learn Your Secrets

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Happy Monday!  We're starting out the week by revisiting a post on our Facebook page which deserves its proper due on our blog too.  We all know that companies are researching us as much as we do them, but as Charles Duhigg's NYT article titled "How Companies Learn Your Secrets" explains in excruciating detail, the extent to which retailers like Target can hone in on select life events based on shifting purchasing habits is, well, fascinating. We highly recommend devoting a solid 20 minutes of quality workload procrastination to reading the whole thing.  Yes it's a bit long in parts, but stick with it through the obligatory rat-and-maze experiment because the case study on Febreze alone is worth the price of admission.  Overall, depending on your metaporical empty-or-full-half-glass outlook when it comes to consumer psychology, you might come away a bit terrified, or you might want to try to cheat the system next time you buy groceries, or you might be jonesing to try that spiffy weight loss trick.