The top sales at Walmart as a storm approaches are Pop-Tarts and beer.
Walmart's Strangest Hurricane Discovery: Pop-Tarts & Beer
When Hurricane Frances barreled toward Florida in 2004, Walmart's chief information officer Linda M. Dillman made a decision that would become one of the most famous case studies in retail data mining. She instructed her team to dig through trillions of bytes of customer purchase data to predict what people would buy before the storm hit. What they discovered surprised everyone.
The top two items weren't bottled water or batteries—they were beer and strawberry Pop-Tarts. Specifically, strawberry Pop-Tarts saw sales increase approximately seven times their normal rate as hurricanes approached. Beer consistently ranked as the number one pre-hurricane purchase across Walmart stores.
Why These Two Items?
The beer makes intuitive sense. If you're going to be stuck inside for days without power, you might as well have something to help pass the time. But strawberry Pop-Tarts? That required deeper analysis.
From a practical standpoint, Pop-Tarts are nearly perfect emergency food:
- No refrigeration required
- No cooking or heating needed
- Can be eaten for any meal
- Extremely long shelf life
- Individually wrapped portions
- Provides quick calories and comfort food appeal
The strawberry flavor specifically dominated, likely because it's the most universally appealing flavor—not too polarizing, sweet enough to be comforting, and familiar to nearly everyone.
How Walmart Used This Discovery
This wasn't just an interesting factoid—Walmart turned it into action. Before Hurricane Florence in 2018, the company shipped more than 350,000 boxes of strawberry Pop-Tarts to stores in the hurricane's projected path. They stocked shelves based on predictive algorithms rather than standard ordering patterns.
The 2004 analysis revolutionized how retailers prepare for disasters. By mining purchase data from previous hurricanes like Charley and Frances, Walmart could forecast demand with remarkable accuracy. They knew not just what would sell, but how much and when.
The Broader Impact
This hurricane-Pop-Tarts discovery became a cornerstone example in business schools and data science courses worldwide. It demonstrated how big data could reveal non-obvious patterns in human behavior during crisis situations.
The lesson extended beyond emergency preparedness. If data could predict Pop-Tart purchases before hurricanes, what else could it forecast? Retailers began applying similar techniques to everything from seasonal shopping to local weather-influenced buying patterns.
While Walmart no longer publicly shares this specific sales data (the company confirmed the strawberry Pop-Tarts statistic is based on "old data"), the principle remains: people's shopping behaviors during emergencies follow predictable patterns, even when those patterns seem strange at first glance. And sometimes those patterns involve toaster pastries and alcohol.