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embedding-shape 18 hours ago [-]
> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food?
> Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time!
Funny to who? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying weight loss pills + loads of candy/sodas) could be fun I guess, but just cookies and rubber? Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
mritchie712 17 hours ago [-]
here's how this likely went down:
1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about"
2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting
3. posted it anyway
andy99 13 hours ago [-]
They did it interactively with Claude, it’s possible that it played up the significance and humor of the findings in a way that the interaction left the user feeling like they were really on to something.
apathydinosaur 12 hours ago [-]
That's the smoking gun.
spullara 12 hours ago [-]
Funnier than the article.
stephantul 17 hours ago [-]
The file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.
duzer65657 11 hours ago [-]
scanned through pretty much the entire post. Still waiting for the funny part.
jayd16 11 hours ago [-]
Have you ever played Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples?
Its not so much that the juxtaposition on its own is hilarious. You have to build a scenario. It's fun to imagine funny scenarios.
Is the cart for a person who wants to treat themselves and these are their priorities? Is it a very specific mating ritual?
It's a writing prompt for your imagination. In reality almost all of these are surely very mundane repurchases but that's not the point.
speedgoose 13 hours ago [-]
Having to wear adult diapers after giving birth is not unexpected.
12 hours ago [-]
fecal_henge 12 hours ago [-]
Nor funny.
randycupertino 6 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of when I would get clowned for getting Diet Coke at McDonalds or Taco Bell. "You're eating fast food, why even bother with a DIET coke, har har har..."
I just like the taste better. :-/ but so many people have thought that was soooo funny.
It implies SEX but without saying it out loud, haha, so funny, am I rite my fellow 16 year olds?
> Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
You don't get it, it's about the ASS. So funny!
Some people just remain adolescents.
14 hours ago [-]
fragmede 17 hours ago [-]
It's "funny" because sex is taboo in puritanical cultures like the US. Obviously you're not going to use the lube on the Oreo's, but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something? It's unexpected and the mind laughs, even though theres a perfectly normal explanation that doesn't involve those two things being together. Same for adult diapers and baby food. They have an elderly parent and a baby in the house, but the terminally online brain jumps to "it's a weird sex thing".
embedding-shape 17 hours ago [-]
> but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something?
This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.
fragmede 17 hours ago [-]
Why would an LLM make that mistake? It depends on why you went shopping. If you are blessed with a surplus of executive function, you can make a list and then get everything on that list when you go shopping. If you are not so privileged, you find yourself having to go to the store in pursuit of a specific mission. Get all the thinks to bake a cake for the birthday party that's to tonight, and don't get laundry detergent while you're there, even though you're running out.
Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
Because after a couple of visits in the store, you realize that all the items you buy aren't necessarily related to each other, either by observing your own behavior or others. Not sure having a list or not is important, jumping to conclusions based on "oh, they bought oreo AND lube, they must be related" is exactly what you see LLMs do, and why you generally don't want to tell them unrelated stuff, because of how they work they end up being part of the context and kind of "pollute" the rest.
wildfireday2 10 hours ago [-]
It’s not that deep. The model was prompted to mine for humor in a mundane dataset and it dutifully did its best to find something chuckleworthy. It got OP to laugh out loud for some reason and take the time to post this. Presumably there weren’t system prompts to criticize and refuse to engage with juvenile attempts at banal humor. And why should there be?
After all it’s training data would include a vast corpus of body-function humor, fart jokes, and very old supermarket shopping list jokes that are being tested here.
breezybottom 16 hours ago [-]
Sex is about as normal and pervasive in American culture as it is anywhere. Have you never watched HBO?
archerx 18 hours ago [-]
The kale and enema one makes sense, they get so much fiber they get blocked up and need an enema. The parsley and condoms I don’t get but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. Oreo’s and lube I don’t get, it could be the absurdity that has the writer thinking it’s funny.
embedding-shape 17 hours ago [-]
> but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”.
My mind went to "A fairly typical household where grandpa/grandma lives in the house and you also have at least one baby, or someone (maybe same grandpa/grandma) have troubles digesting food". Funny how different our casual links can be formed in our head :)
squigz 17 hours ago [-]
I admit I had the same thought as GP, though without the unnecessary kink-shaming.
I guess GP and I are both actually part of that "terminally online" group they're complaining about.
nkrisc 13 hours ago [-]
Some things should be shameful. Not because they’re bad, but so they remain private.
thomascountz 17 hours ago [-]
Baby food is often just puréed fruits and vegetables. Adult diapers are only funny if you've never considered that being able-bodied is temporary.
It is more likely that the person purchasing adult diapers and baby food is the caregiver of an adult. Perhaps of themselves, or an aging parent, or their spouse who is recovering from surgery.
jll29 17 hours ago [-]
> The parsley and condoms I don’t get
Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness
involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal,
per-household look.
Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.
The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
onion2k 17 hours ago [-]
Parsley is used by people who don't cook often as a garnish to make a meal look more fancy. The sort of thing you might do if you have a date coming over and want to impress...
malfist 13 hours ago [-]
Hey, parsley has it's place. Especially in a butter or chimicuri sauce. I believe the listing was for flat parsley which is not the fancy garnish one.
10 hours ago [-]
nkrisc 13 hours ago [-]
Baby food and adult diapers sounds more like someone suffering from some kind of gastrointestinal illness, not something funny. Or perhaps more likely, a woman with a young baby who is still suffering from pelvic issues related to pregnancy and childbirth.
LilBytes 18 hours ago [-]
I mean, I laughed. Soo...
zem 17 hours ago [-]
yeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me
lukewarm707 16 hours ago [-]
i enjoyed the author sense of play and enthusiasm.
with play they surely gained much domain understanding and source of new ideas.
bad for company and society to enforce the oppressive conformity.
Hnrobert42 17 hours ago [-]
Yes! This is how you do humor. Demand precision. Dissect all the things!
embedding-shape 17 hours ago [-]
Nah, but sometimes a bit of thinking, reasoning and editing can make things funny, doesn't mean you need to create a thesis about it. But in my mind, just stating "Someone bought Oreos and lube in a store" isn't exactly the epitome of humor, maybe I'm just getting old.
14 hours ago [-]
disillusioned 18 hours ago [-]
Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post:
Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart.
Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.
anonu 17 hours ago [-]
Berries are most certainly not seasonal anymore. They should be but we thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them. They're always on the shelf. Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Probably something that can be found in this dataset as well.
jkahrs595 17 hours ago [-]
The pricing of berries are certainly seasonal. Bananas are cheap year-round.
embedding-shape 17 hours ago [-]
> Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore?
Depends on the store I'd wager. We have a store here (Ametller Origen) that sell things they cultivate/make themselves "nearby" (in the same region, and among other things they sell too) and sell in their own retail stores, I'm guessing most of their customers do indeed follow the habits of seasonality as lots of stuff isn't available outside of the seasons.
pasc1878 17 hours ago [-]
Depends where you are.
I am in Southern England.
Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.
Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.
Prices also change over the year.
stevekemp 11 hours ago [-]
I don't get snobby about food very often, but I have to say that these days strawberries and tomatoes are things I never buy any more.
They're so large, watery, and tasteless, that I grow them myself or go without.
A lot of foods are no longer seasonal, as noted above, but I can't say I can taste the difference. Except for tomatoes and strawberries where I think I can - who knows, maybe I'm imagining it?
collabs 17 hours ago [-]
I had an interesting conversation with my mom recently when she said don't buy apples. It isn't in season right now. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't even know apples had a season. I just bought the bag of gala apples without much thought to it.
robrain 16 hours ago [-]
Apples are kept in cold storage to extend “the season” across the year. No guarantee you’ll get fresh apples in a supermarket even if you see workers harvesting them as you drive to the store.
kaikai 4 hours ago [-]
If you pay attention you’ll see that apples are more expensive the longer it’s been since apple season. They’re cheapest in fall, and the price rises over the year. They store really well, though, so they’re still available year-round.
malfist 13 hours ago [-]
Available year round and seasonal isn't an oxymoron. Something can be both. Just look at potatoes, we learned a long time ago how to store them. Doesn't mean there isn't a time in the fall with they're the freshest and cheapest.
01284a7e 16 hours ago [-]
They are highly seasonal. We have not "thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them".
StilesCrisis 16 hours ago [-]
We absolutely buy berries (and tomatoes) when in season. The flavor is much better!
smelendez 13 hours ago [-]
Very interesting!
> Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.
The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.
Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.
> Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.
trebligdivad 16 hours ago [-]
The initial grouping of 'pack of organic bananas' with individual bananas feels like a wrong number in the pack problem; eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
> eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.
Can't you just grab a bigger cluster/bunch and remove N bananas so it has the amount you want? Or remove 3 from the bunch that has five so two 5+2 clusters? Feels like I'm missing something obvious here.
LourensT 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, because Instacart is ordering for delivery :)
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah, of course, guess I kind of forgot the overall context, and I was thinking in-person shopping... Thanks! :)
trebligdivad 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, once I can put in the delivery details something like '7 medium size bananas, with no bruising, varying in ripeness from almost ready to still slightly green' and let a robot at the other end sort it out I'll be happy.
hbcdbff 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.
breezybottom 16 hours ago [-]
No.
rpdillon 15 hours ago [-]
When I worked on recommendation systems 15 years ago, I learned about the "banana problem", where bananas are so commonly purchased, they tend to be the top recommendation regardless of other foods in your cart. The solution, of course, was to bias for less commonly purchased items, but it was my first run-in with the weird statistics around banana purchasing patterns.
linsomniac 12 hours ago [-]
This comment is WAY more interesting than the article it is a comment on.
xg15 15 hours ago [-]
I imagine people either buy single bananas as a quick snack or bananas in bulk for breakfast. (Ignoring the "funny" uses here). I wonder if this kind of irregular pattern is a reflection on people's breakfast habits.
estetlinus 11 hours ago [-]
It is the only fruit that requires no washing before consuming. And also, it makes my tummy hard.
DaedalusII 17 hours ago [-]
much more interesting than the actual article
amelius 17 hours ago [-]
My conclusion: there's nothing funny about groceries, no matter how you order them. Counterexamples welcome.
(Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket.
Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)
zem 17 hours ago [-]
> Counterexamples welcome.
I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn
the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.
manwe150 16 hours ago [-]
A few I’ve seen in person are someone buying about a dozen pallets of water and a half dozen of a vegetable (it was cabbage or leek if I recall). But that was more about the absurd looking quantity while only wanting just those two items. I assume most of the “funny orders” I see are restaurant owners who already got most of their items delivered, which makes them a large deviation from the expected family purchaser. This is something I have only seen at specific stores (similar to costco) in specific cities.
jayd16 10 hours ago [-]
Garlic and wooden gardening stakes.
Tampons and a self-help relationship type magazine, maybe?
Masks and toilet paper, so retro.
Wine, a spirit, and Wine and Spirits magazine.
lionkor 17 hours ago [-]
Some combinations could be funny, like a pregnancy test and something really mundane but odd like a whole pineapple and a large bag of lettuce
jayd16 10 hours ago [-]
Pregnancy test and a blue marker.
malfist 13 hours ago [-]
Why would that be funny?
lionkor 10 hours ago [-]
Not like funny like a joke is funny, but funny like having sun and rain at the same time is funny :)
> The other day I was idly wondering what are the strangest combinations of items people buy at grocery stores. The kind of shopping cart that makes the cashier snicker and later tell his friends, "Dude, can you believe this guy came in and only bought condoms and apples?"
When you are a cashier, customers make comments like this all the time, preemptively defending themselves to you for their "eccentric" purchases. Truthfully, as a cashier you are on auto pilot and scanning things as quickly as possible and trying to not make mistakes. We are a store that sells these items and I do not find it surprising or strange that you are buying any of them. The fact that you can buy condoms and apples here is what makes this market "super". It's my job, I'm here to sell it to you. Paper or plastic?
wildfireday2 10 hours ago [-]
Different experience at small town independent grocers that greet their regular customers by name and are summoned with a bell.
brendanfinan 17 hours ago [-]
Which one of these was supposed to be funny?
callmeal 17 hours ago [-]
All of them. Don't you know you're supposed to make fun of people that a "different" from you? Get with the program already. (/s if it wasn't already clear.)
armchairhacker 13 hours ago [-]
"Banana" and "Extra Fancy Unsalted Mixed Nuts" only occurred once? They go together.
fecal_henge 13 hours ago [-]
Here is a likely scenario for the baby food/ adult diapers combo: Someone who suffered so much damage during childbirth that they are still struggling with their bowels by the time their baby is on solids. Hilarious!
Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.
kaikai 4 hours ago [-]
The AI still can’t understand that Armenian cucumbers should have a MUCH higher potential humor value than milk.
darwinwhy 17 hours ago [-]
Using LLM embedding cosine similarity to classify products into larger categories (bricks) wasn’t something I would’ve thought of. Last I heard of word vectors was back when word2vec came out, I guess in the back of my mind I knew LLMs have something similar and it makes sense that open weight models reveal that information easily.
jorams 9 hours ago [-]
> So what happens if we look only at small carts, where the entire order is just 2 or 3 items?
How is this the last thing in the article? The sole example given of a "funny" combination (apples and condoms, weirdly bad example) is only remotely funny because those are the only items.
furyofantares 11 hours ago [-]
Once you get to the LLM judging them, you've given up, and might as well just prompt the LLM to make up funny item co-occurrences.
Nothing wrong with giving up though, it's a hard problem for all the same reasons recommendation engines are.
akoboldfrying 17 hours ago [-]
This idea sounded like it had lots of humour potential. Unfortunately, if there is in fact humour to be found in this dataset, it appears to be beyond the reach of current data science techniques.
xg15 15 hours ago [-]
Are there any "funny" combinations in that list that don't involve toilet humor?
jyounker 8 hours ago [-]
Are there things in that list that involve toilet humor and are funny?
jyounker 8 hours ago [-]
What a lame article. Even I can do better: one cucumber, vaseline, and a box of ultra-thin condoms.
card_zero 16 hours ago [-]
I wish they didn't know this. I wish all the stores could agree to mind their own business and sell their products ingenuously, in blissful unawareness of what any customer buys alongside what other thing, instead of following us around taking notes.
pluralmonad 13 hours ago [-]
I like to think I have a sense of humor, but if this is funny, maybe I don't.
jyounker 8 hours ago [-]
You have nothing to worry about.
NDlurker 11 hours ago [-]
Where is the comedy?
esafak 13 hours ago [-]
Analyzing substitutes and complements was a mainstay of data scientists 10-20 years ago. Too mundane to mention now.
> Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time!
Funny to who? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying weight loss pills + loads of candy/sodas) could be fun I guess, but just cookies and rubber? Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about"
2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting
3. posted it anyway
Its not so much that the juxtaposition on its own is hilarious. You have to build a scenario. It's fun to imagine funny scenarios.
Is the cart for a person who wants to treat themselves and these are their priorities? Is it a very specific mating ritual?
It's a writing prompt for your imagination. In reality almost all of these are surely very mundane repurchases but that's not the point.
I just like the taste better. :-/ but so many people have thought that was soooo funny.
It implies SEX but without saying it out loud, haha, so funny, am I rite my fellow 16 year olds?
> Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
You don't get it, it's about the ASS. So funny!
Some people just remain adolescents.
This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.
Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.
After all it’s training data would include a vast corpus of body-function humor, fart jokes, and very old supermarket shopping list jokes that are being tested here.
My mind went to "A fairly typical household where grandpa/grandma lives in the house and you also have at least one baby, or someone (maybe same grandpa/grandma) have troubles digesting food". Funny how different our casual links can be formed in our head :)
I guess GP and I are both actually part of that "terminally online" group they're complaining about.
It is more likely that the person purchasing adult diapers and baby food is the caregiver of an adult. Perhaps of themselves, or an aging parent, or their spouse who is recovering from surgery.
Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal, per-household look.
Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside.
The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
with play they surely gained much domain understanding and source of new ideas.
bad for company and society to enforce the oppressive conformity.
Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart.
Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.
Depends on the store I'd wager. We have a store here (Ametller Origen) that sell things they cultivate/make themselves "nearby" (in the same region, and among other things they sell too) and sell in their own retail stores, I'm guessing most of their customers do indeed follow the habits of seasonality as lots of stuff isn't available outside of the seasons.
Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.
Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.
Prices also change over the year.
They're so large, watery, and tasteless, that I grow them myself or go without.
A lot of foods are no longer seasonal, as noted above, but I can't say I can taste the difference. Except for tomatoes and strawberries where I think I can - who knows, maybe I'm imagining it?
> Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.
The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.
Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.
> Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.
Can't you just grab a bigger cluster/bunch and remove N bananas so it has the amount you want? Or remove 3 from the bunch that has five so two 5+2 clusters? Feels like I'm missing something obvious here.
(Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket.
Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)
I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn
the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.
Tampons and a self-help relationship type magazine, maybe?
Masks and toilet paper, so retro.
Wine, a spirit, and Wine and Spirits magazine.
When you are a cashier, customers make comments like this all the time, preemptively defending themselves to you for their "eccentric" purchases. Truthfully, as a cashier you are on auto pilot and scanning things as quickly as possible and trying to not make mistakes. We are a store that sells these items and I do not find it surprising or strange that you are buying any of them. The fact that you can buy condoms and apples here is what makes this market "super". It's my job, I'm here to sell it to you. Paper or plastic?
Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.
How is this the last thing in the article? The sole example given of a "funny" combination (apples and condoms, weirdly bad example) is only remotely funny because those are the only items.
Nothing wrong with giving up though, it's a hard problem for all the same reasons recommendation engines are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_rule_learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_analysis