I've experienced something similar. I don't know that it originated with Google, but for a time I constantly was shown ads about sites I'd recently patronized, or had been ordering from for years. That seems to have slacked off, and it never made any sense.
And now, if I go to WalMart, I soon receive an email showing me additional items I might be interested in "based on the purchases during my recent trip to my local WalMart." Or maybe I knew what I wanted to buy, and bought everything I wanted to buy.
Some of the tracking is comical and some of it irritating, and it can begin to seem pretty intrusive and presumptuous. And more and more tracking and follow-up emails is going on within various online vendor sites.
Irritating a customer is worse than marketing budget wasted it’s potentially losing a customer. Companies that do this have no concept of timeliness let alone behavioral marketing. They give all direct marketers a bad name.
Cheap medium, plaster the world with a one size fits all appeal, tantamount to e-mail spam. It doesn’t even arise to the level of Sham-Wow or Snuggies. At least they were somewhat fun and targeted, late night low budget media buys notwithstanding. But, there’s design and forethought even there, people viewing tv in the middle of the night as a group are more susceptible, so you get that sort of infomercial, they want to belong, they’re bored and lonely as a group, so they pull out the card and call. Kind of like old folks and collectible kitkat, the direct response ads are almost always in the middle of the day if infomercial.
Those guys know what they’re doing. What you describe Walmart as doing is scattershot and borderline damaging. I’m surprised.