In my last blog, I demonstrated how the noise in online sales data could be correlated (to some extent) to the weather. What I didn’t tell you was that I was saving my more interesting findings for a separate post. It’s the nature of science that many discoveries are accidental, and so it was for me when I discovered (by checking my y-axes of all things) that the effect of weather pales in comparison to the effect that day of week has on our shopping.
This is a bit obvious in retrospect; I for one frequently buy electronics early in the week in the hopes that I’ll have my cables or components by the weekend, but I know quite a few weekend electronics shoppers. So given an entire population’s varying predilections, how does the timing of our purchases pan out on the national scale?