As a database administrator by day, I find shopping at Wal Mart to be a fascinating exercise. For decades, the Bentonville Arkansas based mega-corp has squashed competitors and expanded massively by doing one thing exceedingly well: mining customer and demographic data.

Now don’t get me wrong. As a liberal tree-hugger who supports local businesses (even with all their eccentricities), I’m not one to normally shop at Wal Mart, notwithstanding their excellent DVD sales. But in a pinch, sometimes the Wal Mart on the Old Road in Stevenson Ranch is the only place in town open late that carries what I need.

And last night, my wife and I just so happened to need a birthday card, so off to Wal Mart we went.

So while my wife was checking out the cutesy selection of birthday cards, I wandered over to the pathetic magazine and book section, which occupies a space about the width and depth of two check-out stands. I say pathetic because it’s really not a selection of books at all; rather the books on the shelves are what Wal Mart thinks we in Santa Clarita would be interested in reading.

What I found was pretty interesting though, so I decided to do more research.

On the south bookcase near the entrance were row upon rows of religious books, both fiction and non-fiction. The books fell into two starkly different categories and immediately made me curious about how Wal Mart selected the books it would sell.

On the middle shelf were scores of Spanish-language religious books. “Santa Biblia,” “Jesus Christo,” and many more Catholic books in Spanish aimed squarely at Santa Clarita’s impressive Latino demographic, which according to 2006 Census Data  accounts for some 44,000 residents of Santa Clarita.

This is not that surprising of course; all of Southern California has a large (even a majority) Latino population, and given their general socio-economic status, many of them are likely bargain-hunting Wal Mart shoppers. It makes sense for Wal Mart to target them. What’s more, it makes sense for Wal Mart to target Latino shoppers at this particular store on the Old Road, since it’s the oldest, most run-down, and closest to the freeway store of all the Wal Marts in Santa Clarita.

But above the rows of Spanish books were at least a dozen different religious books targeting another SCV population group. English speaking Mormons!

Yes, just feet away from the entrance where the friendly elderly man greets everyone was veritable treasure trove of Latter Day Saint literature, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I mistakenly wandered into the Book Castle years ago.

There was, of course, multiple handsome family versions of the Book of Mormon with beautiful illustrations.  There was also a book of famous LDS quotations, a book called “Presidents and Prophets” that discussed the history and interaction of US Presidents and LDS Presidents, a general Mormon history book relating to the United States and two other books on Mormons in the military, including one focused solely on Mormon fighter, helicopter and space shuttle pilots. That book, titled “Supersonic Saints” held my attention for quite a few minutes.

Needless to say, I was surprised. The LDS church only has around 6 million members in the United States, maybe twice that worldwide, so  obviously Wal Mart isn’t stocking these special, limited-interest religious books at all of its thousands of stores. What made Santa Clarita different?

Well, of course, we all know there’s a significant LDS population in the SCV. Our own Congressman is LDS, and according to the Church’s own website, there’s at least three or four stake centers (I guess the equivalent to a church) in Santa Clarita. So it’s a significant population, but how significant, and how does that population work into Wal Mart’s formula when it comes to selecting which books to display on its limited shelf space?

I wanted to find out just how many LDS people were in town, so I did some digging.

Unfortunately, the bums in Congress years ago forbid the US Census Department from inquiring about religion, so Census.gov was absolutely no help to me there. All I can assume is that a great percentage of this Valley’s LDS adherents are likely white and English speaking, which gives me a large sample of some 110,000 people, according to Census.gov’s stats.

So I had to find data elsewhere. Wal Mart, afterall, certainly had data on our town such that somewhere in Arkansas, they determined that shoppers at the Old Road Wal Mart might be interested in LDS books. So it has to be out there.

Fortunately, I stumbled across a great website called The Association of Religious Data Archive, a program set up and maintained by Pennsylvania State University.

This modern, easy to use website has in-depth material on the makeup of religion in the United States, and better yet, allows you to drill down to the community level with an extensive mapping feature.

So what does it tell us?

Well, Santa Clarita is overwhelmingly religious according to the ARDA with some 50-70% of its residents described as “religious adherents.”

So Wal Mart’s got an easy score right there- obviously, they need to stock the Old Road’s bookshelves with religious books. But which kind?

Drilling down further, we find that 25 to 50% of SCV residents are Catholic adherents, which is pretty consistent with the Latino population plus others who regularly attend (or perhaps never attend) one of Santa Clarita’s three Catholic churches.

That’s an easy data point right there- put Catholic books at Wal Mart, preferrably in Espanol.

Evangelical Protestants are a much smaller segment of the population despite the scores upon scores of such churches you can find in the Yellow Pages. They account for perhaps 2-5% of the population according to ARDA.

Surprisingly, Jewish adherents represent some 2-5% of Santa Clarita valley religious adherents according to this site.

So what about Mormons? Well, the same site says there are some 97,347 Mormon Adherents in Los Angeles County practicing at some 239 stake centers or temples or what-have-you.  That’s a pretty impressive statistic, for while the largest religious group in LA County is the Catholics (at 3.8 million), Mormons are by reckoning in about 4th place, behind Jews (564,700) and Evangelical protestants (587,000)  and slightly ahead of Muslims (92,000).

And in Santa Clarita itself, the data suggests that some 2-5% of Santa Clarita’s inhabitants are LDS adherents. That’s anywhere between 5,000 and 12,500 people, if you count the entire Santa Clarita population of 250,000 people or 2,300 and 6,000 people if you count the 110,000 white people in the Census data.

After I found all this information, I was even more confused, however. It seems there aren’t that many LDS adherents in town. Not enough to devote an entire row of books in their otherwise pathetic book section to, anyway.

Of course Wal Mart has infinitely better data than I do. They have receipts of what people buy and they can mine that data to see what sells and what doesn’t. It’s possible that LDS adherents in town buy more religious literature than other religious adherents, so much so in fact that the gigantic corporation thinks it can make a buck or two competing directly with Book Castle.

After my search was complete, I felt a bit creepy about Wal Mart’s scope and grasp of data about us. Here’s this supremely powerful, multi-national corporation that knows a small percentage of my neighbors so well, it can stock books that directly appeal to them.

Stay tuned next time while I explore Wal Mart’s magazine rack. Wait till you see what Wal Mart’s magazine selection has to say about us!