market research

Market research
You can find out "who you are" according to your zip code at this site. A number of different market segmentation "products" are available, and you can see who you are according to all of them.

Both the segments and the neighborhoods (in Chicago, anyway) end up seeming like Frankenstein's monsters of incompatible elements. People who attend professional basketball games on their household income of $14K. People who use the internet to manage their assets, and eat at Roy Rogers. (Well, OK, that one might not be incompatible.) Lots and lots of people who drive Saabs. The word for any person over 25 is "couple."

So this makes me wonder again something I have wondered before: does market research skew towards households where there is someone home to answer the phone in the middle of the day? Which might account for all kinds of inaccuracies.

And a related question: who IS it who doesn't hang up the phone when Citibank (or whoever) calls up and you get a machine telling you to hang on the line for an operator? I mean, they wouldn't keep doing this if it weren't effective, right? I mean, that's how capitalism works, right?

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