That is not how marketing for a retail store works at all! They'd put themselves out of business by pulling that shit.

They want to gauge what you are interested in for a number of reasons:

1. purchasing frequency. Do people who buy this product tend to do so as a repeat purchase or as one-off purchases? If you know this you can adjust discounts to pull in more people that would otherwise make this purchase at a different store.

2. purchasing correlation. So you've bought a new Xbox. What else do you want to buy alongside it? Games and controllers of course! There are a ton of other, less obvious correlated purchases out there, and this is great information for bundling promotions.

3. attention span: does this product actually get people's attention? Seems pretty obvious why they want this data.

4. does said attention translate into purchases? If not, why not? Might be an ideal target for a targeted survey later. Can be used to justify replacing a product on store shelves.

5. customer metrics: provides accurate information about the activity going on in the store, what times are the busiest, which times are the lull hours, and accurate headcounts for number of customers.