I’m not sure if this particular story is true, but the spirit of it is. At the time I was working for a marketing technology company who helped provide some of

I’m not sure if this particular story is true, but the spirit of it is. At the time I was working for a marketing technology company who helped provide some of the predictive tech for Target and MANY other retailers (mostly grocery stores). I worked on the team that developed the predictions for the retailers. They were quite accurate because (in those naive and lax security days) the retailers would send us every transaction including the CC number used in the purchase. So the company could develop a pretty robust profile of purchases for a customer across multiple retailers. Fortunately all the company cared about at the time was predictive coupon printing. If you ever got a separate coupon printed with your receipt it was that company.