I've never liked Target for its intrusive tracking of customer spending[1] through their branded credit cards and other loyalty card schemes, because those neve

I've never liked Target for its intrusive tracking of customer spending[1] through their branded credit cards and other loyalty card schemes, because those never add any value for me. (I grew up shopping at the third Target store in the whole country, my sister used to work at Target, and we live a short walk from a Super Target, but the company's emphasis on gathering data over genuine customer service[2] turns me off.) Because Target is the closest brick and mortar store to our house for many kinds of items, we still buy things there. I usually try to pay in cash. I'll have to check our credit-card records [sigh] and see what's going on in our accounts. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe... [2] Personal anecdote alert: Target once had an in-house captive brand (not a Target brand, but a brand available in no other store) of "oven bakeware" that didn't even meet the Uniform Commercial Code warranty of merchantability, as it would shatter if you used it in an oven to bake something. We found that out just before a meal when we were all hungry. The local store gave us all kinds of run-around about simply refunding our money for the defective product. That was ill-timed for Target, as one of my wife's students had just given us a gift certificate for Sam's Club, and we discovered that the much-maligned Sam's Club is better about returns and about customer service in general than Target. We have shifted THOUSANDS of dollars a year from Target, my home-town store I grew up with, to Sam's, the store everyone is inclined to decry, in the years since then. When a store sells a defective product and doesn't make that right, I don't give it a lot of second chances. (My sister's former job at Target was to be a buyer, and she thought that if a Target buyer screws up and purchases a bad product, Target should make that right, period.) By contrast, I recently bought what was labeled as an "Epson ink-jet printer cartridge" through a third-party seller on Amazon, and when the product arrived it was labeled "Not an OEM product," and plainly wasn't identical to an actual Epson printer cartridge. I contacted Amazon about the purchase, and an Amazon representative said my money would be refunded and I didn't have to return the product. That is the way to use big data to build a better customer experience--Amazon could verify how the product was labeled on its site, and perhaps had another customer complain to verify that I wasn't making this up. Amazon consistently treats me like my user experience is more important that Amazon's next-quarter bottom line, and that builds immense customer loyalty for me.