Many consumers buy soft drinks and potato chips together when they shop at a grocery, convenience, or mass merchandiser store. But when querying its marketing information system (MIS), one convenience store discovered that when consumers bought a sandwich, many also purchased toothpaste. This information was obtained from checkout scanner data from its stores nationwide. This convenience store used to extract this hidden information from its MIS to find the statistical link between the two product categories.

data mining

Explanation:

In business, Data mining is the act of obtaining information about customer's behavior that might be use for the company's benefit.

On most cases, Data mining is used to predict the behavior of a certain group of customers. By creating this prediction, the company could create a product or marketing strategy that can efficiently target that group.

in the excerpt above,

The shop obtain the data that a lot of consumers who bought sandwich also bought toothpaste a long with it.

From this data, the shop could make assumption that there is a correlation between the sandwhich and the tooth paste. (Maybe many of sandwhich buyers need the toothpaste to remove the sandwich's smell from their mouth). The shop could use this data and arrange the placement of the toothpaste so it's close to the sandwhich with the hope that it might increase its sales.