The idea is to boost "dwell time."

Traditionally retailers measure "footfall," as the number of people entering a store is known, but those numbers say nothing about where people go and how long they spend there. But nowadays, a ubiquitous piece of technology can fill the gap: the mobile phone. Path Intelligence (*), a British company working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tracked people’s phones at Gunwharf Quays, a large retail and leisure centre in Portsmouth -- not by monitoring calls, but by plotting the positions of handsets as they transmit automatically to cellular networks. It found that when dwell time rose 1% sales rose 1.3%.

Technology will also begin to identify customers’ emotions. Often a customer struggling to decide which of two items is best ends up not buying either. A third "decoy" item, which is not quite as good as the other two, can make the choice easier and more pleasurable.

(*) Consider:

The FootPath technology is the only system available on the market today that can gather information on shopper paths continuously and accurately.

From the archive, Decius:

Unless there is some detail that I'm missing, this sounds positively Orwellian.

Also from Decius:

Noooooo problem ... don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... that's what you want ... that's what you NEED ... Buy my shit! Buy it -- give me money! Don't worry about the consequences ... there's no consequences. If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Note:

fMRI is the new polygraph.

Brain reward circuitry responds to drug and sexual cues presented outside awareness. The results underscore the sensitivity of the brain to “unseen” reward signals and may represent the brain's primordial signature for desire.

Finally:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals" everything is made of chemicals.