You might actually be the reason your favorite snacks keep getting discontinued. Consumers who keep buying niche or soon-to-be-discontinued items are what market researchers call "harbingers of failure." Brands look at past purchase data and demographics during early testing to spot these buyers, then treat their interest as a red flag before a wider release. That part comes from a real 2015 Journal of Marketing Research study built on actual retail transaction data, and later work found these buyers cluster in certain zip codes. We couldn't find anything backing the claim that this goes back to the 1960s or that companies ID people through debit/credit card numbers, so take that as a guess, not something confirmed.