Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough Is a Farmer in the San Francisco

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough is a farmer in the San Francisco, California area. She grows herbs thought to be medicinal and other products thought to promote health and nutrition. Her business is quite large, but in the past she has found it hard to make decisions about which products to add, drop or to consider for future crops because she has a difficult time finding market data. However, she learned recently there is a firm by the name of SPINS that happens to be located in San Francisco that provides data collected by scanners in natural and organic food stores. Her problem, now solved, illustrates which disadvantage of scanner tracking data discussed in your textbook?

A) For those products distributed through small stores, not covered by Nielsen or Information Resources, there is no scanner tracking data.
B) Herbs, nor any product that is not endorsed by the American Medical Association, may be tracked via scanning devices.
C) Scanning data is useful only for products that are distributed nationally because all scanner data are reported as a percent of national distribution.
D) Scanner data, even from small stores, is reported quickly to decision makers.
E) None of the above is true; there is no discussion of this topic in your text.