[dosplatos]

I worked in retail ops for ~10 years. I can tell you the problem mainly lies with your banks and credit card companies. Most small retailers aren't fully utilizing their data, and often lack the knowledge to do so.

Worried about your purchase history being sold/shared? Use cash. I'm quite certain credit card companies and banks are much better at selling your data than the local grocery store (large retailers are definite offenders though).

> The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

TIL. What's really crap about this is the predicting of human actions vs. improving products.

When I worked in retail, I made a lot of use of various dimensions of purchase data. Time of day, day of week, day of month, time of year, and so on. This is vitally important information. Some other abstract information I used was mostly researched - what event happened last year to explain this dip or increase in our sales? What event is happening this year that might affect sales? When you're trying to prevent food waste, but have adequate stock, there's a lot of information to take into account.

If I had better access to data, I would have been much more efficient at my job. This would have meant many things to pass off to customers: cleaner stores, better product availability, better product selection, better/faster assistance in service departments. For the most part, data isn't made available to improve products or services :/