John Gruber has a piece up about retailers disabling NFC at checkout to prevent customers from checking out using Apple Pay. Retailers are intentionally degrading the customer experience in order to retain the ability to collect data about their customers’ habits. This tradeoff is near and dear to me, as analytics is currently a huge part of my job.

What I’d like to know is, what’s the return these companies are getting from tracking the behavior of specific users? For one thing, the work to build systems to exploit this data is resource intensive, and often results in failure. Companies are risking hurting their business by inconveniencing customers in exchange for the opportunity to make more money by exploiting the purchase history of their customers. I’d be really, really surprised if the economics actually work.