Why are marketers so obsessed with collecting data on their customers? It seems so absurd. On the one hand, they come up with ridiculous surveilance tech like

Why are marketers so obsessed with collecting data on their customers? It seems so absurd. On the one hand, they come up with ridiculous surveilance tech like this to track everything their customers do in their stores, so they can better understand how to sell crap to their customers. On the other hand these big stores hire the least experienced, cheapest staff that they can find. If they just hired actual sales people and made sure that enough employees were around the store to talk to customers, nobody would need surveillance tech to find out what customers want. But I guess automation is everything, and the goal is to have a store that doesn't depend on their employees. Why bother hiring experienced sales people for every store when you can get away with a handful of marketers that automatically analyze customer data of hundreds of stores...