Purchase data sharing with 3rd parties and facial recognition,how rampant are they? And do you know anything about how they track cell phone's wifi mac as a customer goes around the store?

Data Sharing Agreements: None that I know of. That bit is a little out of my range.

Facial Recognition: Very, Very Little. Only in one store at the moment, and it's designed for Asset Protection and tracking a thief around the store.

As for tracking MAC addresses, we track Enterprise devices that associates use, but not customers.

Does 1 person's weekly buying habits affect a store?

I feel like everything I buy has gotten more variety since I started shopping there.

Also, how did you find out about HN?

Not really, many of the stores are $1M+, so a $100 purchase of groceries could just be considered an outlier. The bigger changes you'll find is when word of mouth spreads about a specific product. Ex. If Tide came out with a new version of the pods, sales will be slow (assuming no advertising) for the first few weeks, but it acts more like an exponential curve if the product catches on.

Good! The Dark pattern for the store layout is working :P

Friend referred me.

Why is PULSE such a steaming pile?

Because our internal infrastructure is a steaming pile of s*. Probably. I don't use it, so I can't particularly comment.