Why Retailers Are Becoming Meteorologists

Google's BigQuery service allows users to run near-instantaneous queries in massive data sets with billions of entries. The service, which is similar to Hadoop, is often partnered with commercial software packages for deep analytics used in business plans. One of these partners, Tableau, just gave details on a project that helped retailers adjust their business models for huge snowstorms. Tableau and marketing firm Interactions discovered something interesting at the study's end: Store profits were impacted by the threat of a storm just as much as an actual snowstorm.