Radio Shack, of course, no longer exists as a brand in Canada. It got bought out by Circuit City and renamed The Source. But I thought they were among the most egregious for shamelessly seeking personal information about their customers. You might want to buy two batteries for a grand total of two bucks and even if you had cash to pay for it, Radio Shack's clerks wanted to know your name, postal code, mailing address, home phone – and all sorts of stuff.
Lots of retailers nowadays try the same things — getting e-mail addresses and so on when you make your purchase. In retail speak, they want “a relationship” with you, which means they want to add you to their database of customers, a database which they might cross-reference with a host of other publicly and privately available databases so that they might more efficiently extract money from you or, more likely, limit the choices you might make.
For retailers — and many other businesses, I might add — this has been an important and integral part of their business strategies. But here's something that ought to worry them: According to a new survey by Canada's Privacy Commissioner, 13 per cent of us — better than one in 10 — lie when a store clerk asks us for stuff.