Database marketing is an attempt by businesses to provide more personal service to their customers. Neighborhood shopkeepers knew their regular customers and could provide each one with personal assistance, services, and advice. Many businesses today cannot maintain that one-to-one human relationship because of the prevalence of much larger retail stores, low employee to customer ratios, and high turnover among employees. Some businesses responded by treating all consumers the same. Others used database marketing to divide consumers into segments based on demographic characteristics such as ZIP code, income, and occupation and marketed to each segment as a group. In some cases database marketing chiefly treats consumers according to their individual needs, but in other cases consumers treated as part of a segment find that the business no longer understands their individual preferences, needs, or desires.