You make some good points, hence my upvote to your reply to my comment. Replying to you here, let me respond to some of those points. I am aware that companies track my consumer behavior when I buy from their store. Amazon, of course, is very conspicuous about doing that. ("Customers who bought X also bought Y.") But Amazon's way of tracking my purchases provides a lot of added value. Some of my favorite books and other products were things I had never heard of until Amazon recommended them to me.

At an in-person store, I expect to develop a reputation with people who work there if I shop there often enough to recognize the customer service staff by sight (as I formerly did at our local Super Target). I didn't establish this context up above in my original comment, but I actually began shopping at the local Super Target three days before its official grand opening. (The grand opening was on a Sunday, but the store was open for business the Thursday before.) I bought a TV set (we had just returned to the United States from overseas, and didn't yet have a TV) and some other items from a newly hired cashier. During my conversation with the cashier (partly in Chinese, as I could see she was Chinese) the cashier was distracted, and DIDN'T RING UP the TV. So I got home, and my wife looked at the receipt and said, "How did you spend so little when you just got a TV?" We realized the TV wasn't listed on the receipt. So the next day I took the TV box with its store barcodes and my receipt to the customer service desk, and apologized for walking out of the store without paying for the TV, and asked the customer service staff to ring up the TV so that I could pay for it. The customer service staff were amazed (even here in the honest upper Midwest) that I came back to the store to incur that bill. But I wouldn't think of doing otherwise. I was a little worried that the new cashier would get in trouble for that mistake, but in fact she continued to work at that Target store for at least a year afterward, so the company evidently just treated that as a human-error mistake.

After that we shopped at our local Super Target ALL THE TIME. It's a comfortable walking distance from our house, and our children learn to navigate our neighborhood in large part by taking that walk. But a few years later, new management at Target became more responsive to outside shareholders and a bean-counter mentality took over, and customer service degraded badly. That's when I chanced to purchase the "oven bakeware" that shatters if you put it in an oven to bake something. We never did get our money back on that defective product, and the hassle we received at the same customer service desk, with people we knew by sight looking on, made us feel like thieves while we were asking for legitimate customer recourse under the Uniform Commercial Code. You see, I was demonstrably NOT a thief--I was the guy who had brought the TV box back to the store specifically so that I would be billed for it. If I can't develop a reputation for honesty by being honest at the local store where I shop the most, then their corporate policies can go take a flying leap while I take my business elsewhere. Anyone in the retail business has to provide good customer service as Job One. That's how retail is done. (My sister, if I may be allowed to repeat myself, knows that from when she worked at Target.) So if the company tracking doesn't work to my benefit, I'm out of there.