Imo, this is part of the problem with lack of privacy in today's world.

People will accept this more than not, without a second thought. This leads to the taking of a little bit more until one day you are left wondering where your privacy went.

Again, this is just my humble opinion.

From personal experience I've found that an OpenVPN connection routed over port 53 (same as DNS) bypasses their signin screen entirely.

Of course it's been months since I last tried since I rarely go into the store and don't have reception issues when I do. Could be they've patched it since. Still worth a shot.

Yeah, you can pretty much assume that any random Wi-Fi asking for that information is already doing that. My local mall has one that will accept any old email but it certainly looks like this one wants you to create an actual Walmart account.

In my experience you can type any vaguely email-like string there.

Agshfjfbsksns@jfjfdjjs.uej

Or something.

Have you tried using Tor? Sometimes it works.

Why can't you use cell service?

Well that's just plain invasive. I'll make sure to take myself off of their network next time I'm there.

It sounds to me like they are developing some tools to help map things inside the store. So they can give you directions to things you are looking for maybe. Also with this information they could do something similar to those Amazon stores where you just pick things up and walk out and it charges you automatically.

Not saying you all want to share the info with them. It is invasive. But as an engineer I can see so many cool features I could build with this information.

Temp-mail.org

People that make systems like these are not scared of those that stop using em. What they fear is getting information wrong or spam. Using these facts you can then adjust to the changes.

Junk email + VPN, but I've found that most free wifi services like this explicitly try to inhibit the functionality of mobile VPN clients.

quick vpn over tor and firewall https://f-droid.org/en/packages/pan.alexander.tordnscrypt.stable/

You can just make up some e-mail as, without internet, you couldn't verify it. Also one of the rare cases where VPN directly improve your privacy.