The Fake Wayfair Scandal in Excruciating Detail
Tags: Furniture, Conspiracy Theories, Wayfair, Social Media, Human Trafficking

The Children’s Names

Let’s talk about big numbers. According to Wikipedia’s page for Wayfair, their sales platform has about 14 million products for sale. (Per a claim from Boston Magazine)

Imagine you were a software engineer working for Wayfair and your supervisor comes to you and says, “I need you to make all of the listings for all of the 14 million products on the website unique so the search function on the site works better and customer service knows what product someone is asking about.” Someone at Wayfair was confronted with this exact problem.

The solution they apparently decided on is to add (somewhat) unique names to each listing in order to make it easier for users to search the site for specific bar stools/sectionals/recliners they happened to be looking for. IKEA actually does something similar, naming products after places and people. It’s just that those places and people are Scandinavian.

Where would these hypothetical unique names come from? You might ask. From all appearances, it seems Wayfair decided to scrape the internet for them, pulling them from baby name lists like the one you can find here. [archive] (There are 18,757 names on the girls’ list alone)

Huh.

Try it yourself, if you like. Search a few of the names on this list against Wayfair’s product listings. You’ll get about halfway through the whole list before you start having trouble finding matches. In that context, it seems a lot more plausible that Wayfair could produce listings with these “unusual” names. They’re on these lists. As such, I wouldn’t call it a coincidence when you find a missing child’s name on Wayfair. It’s a bit like winning the lottery when you bought nearly every ticket. Coincidence is probably the wrong word.

Note that this specific list is just one set of data, and doesn’t include every name that Wayfair uses in their process. Last names and boys names aren’t represented here, for example.

If you search for “bookcase” you’ll get 7,163 results (as of the time of writing). But if you search for “Anabel bookcase” you get 1 result. (also as of time of writing.) I hope you can see why this would make communication easier for Wayfair.

Another detail that’s often left out, these names are reused across multiple types of products. Searching for a name without a specific product type yields many results. They’re only interested in making the name + item combos unique.

Did they kidnap 46 girls named Anabel? — Where’s the break point in price between children and beds?

So you hypothetically take these many many thousands of names across millions of products and mash them up against a Google search for “-name- missing” or the database at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (421,394 entries as of 2019) and then you pick out a few examples that sound interesting/convincing. It would be good to pick an unusual sounding one. Probably a recent one, or maybe there’s a product review on the Wayfair page that sounds strange when read with the missing person in mind. That would make for some nice bonus points and extra retweets. Lots of shocked face emoji too.