not just at the point of sale though. from license plate scanning in the parking lot, to facial recognition and traffic analysis in the store, modern brick and mortar retail is not far behind e-commerce when it comes to privacy intrusions to collect data.

Also, you are probably bringing your phone into the store, and it's emitting all sorts of identifying info. I've read about businesses selling tech that uses that info to identify you and uses the signal to track where you go in the store.

Never thought riding a bike and wearing a hat would help me out in the privacy department.

Do they usually have cameras at the face-level or just eye-in-the-sky cameras?

You need to turn off bluetooth on your phone too.

Huh, I wonder if that means you should disable WiFi discovery too.

Never thought I'd be that glad to be in the habit of mobile data only (not that there aren't problems there too...)

Any signal your phone emits with identifying information could be used. Why not your cellular signal?

I'm a lot less concerned about retail stores tracking me via cell signal, as it requires much more specialized hardware/software - meanwhile, it's likely feasible to modify extant in-store WiFi infrastructure to track that.

Yes, WiFi discovery can be used to track to too.