As I understand it, retailers use loyalty cards to improve their customer-level data and as a way to act on that data (e.g. targeted coupons), but even the base

As I understand it, retailers use loyalty cards to improve their customer-level data and as a way to act on that data (e.g. targeted coupons), but even the baseline they can extract without loyalty cards is very important to them. In fact, even after last year's breach, Target clearly isn't happy offloading that nightmare. They're currently teting CurrentC: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2014/11/10/target-testing-its-own-mobile-app-hopeful-that-it-can-rival-apple-pay.html http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2014/11/10/...