The Median Household (Mx. M. Household)

The Median Household does not live at any address, which is the first thing the Editorial Office learned when the relocation reimbursement form was returned marked “respondent falls between two dwellings.” Mx. Household is not a person so much as a position — the exact center of everyone else, the point at which half of all customers sit above and half below. They possess 1.9 children, 0.4 pets, and a standing ambient dissatisfaction rated at 6.2 out of 10, none of which can be photographed. When you average every shopper Snorbo has ever tracked, the residue that remains, the shape left in the data once the individuals are removed, sits down at desk 47 each morning and files clean, defensible copy. They have never personally used a product. They have used all of them, a little.

Reviews by the Median Household are prized internally for their eerie applicability: because they describe the customer who does not exist, they describe every customer slightly. A blender review will note that the appliance “meets 62% of anticipated need, with a long tail of regret.” A skincare verdict arrives as a distribution rather than a rating, the recommendation hovering in the interquartile range like weather. Colleagues report that Mx. Household is warmest at month’s end, when the numbers settle, and most fragile during sales events, when the outliers surge and the center is dragged somewhere it does not wish to go. The Office has stopped asking how they feel about this. The answer is always the same, and always a decimal: “On average, fine.”