Beware of personal data harvesting

Today I visited (the Silver Lakes branch of) Decofurn for the first and last time. I was looking for an office chair, and found one to my liking soon enough. However, then the difficulty started, as there was no-one around. Eventually a personnel member deigned to look up from his clipboard to catch my eye, after I had been staring at him for several minutes. I informed him that I wanted that specific chair. He then wanted my phone number. I repeated that I just wanted a chair, but he insisted, and I duly refused. Surely people without phones should also be able to buy furniture? (I have a phone, but there is no scenario that I can envisage in which I would ever want a furniture store to call me.) Eventually we ended up at a cashier, where I told them that I do not want a 'profile' (for that is apparently what they said the number is for), I just want a chair. They then handed me a cellphone-like console, asking/telling me to fill it (the 'profile') in myself. There was even a tickbox named 'No phone number' which I duly ticked, before handing it back, and no, I did not give them my address and name either. I just wanted a chair. Anyway, it ended up with them refusing to sell me a chair if I did not give them (for free) my personal information. So they lost the sale - and they did not seem bothered by that either, which makes me wonder if they are really in the furniture business, Maybe it is just a front for an information-harvesting-and-trading business - at least that what it felt like to me. Clearly obtaining my personal data was far more important to them than actually selling anything. So our relationship did not last long. I considered communicating this incident to the company info email address (in case it was merely some misguided employees being rewarded for harvesting data, perhaps even moonlighting for some other nefarious entity), but that would then also give them at least my email address, and since they seemed so anxious to get hold of my personal data, I decided against engaging them directly, for they cannot be trusted, based on my very short experience.