Retailers would like to know you better and plenty of them have loyalty programmes that target their customers’ habits in exchange for rewards. All of that loyalty data and customer behaviour can then be mined for gold. But Jesse Green, a Cape-based entrepreneur, is unimpressed with how much waste there is in loyalty programmes.

“It’s strange how few retailers really use the loyalty data they have. I’m working with a topnotch statistician to analyse data and he can come up with nuggets such as, ‘This product only sells in Sandton’. Another example: if a man buys Pampers, there’s an 85 percent chance he either has a baby at home or he’s buying for someone else. If he buys it twice, then there’s a 99.9 percent chance he has a baby at home. That’s just statistics.”