To match customers with their prefered products and save them money?
Not even. But cling to that if it comforts you.
Would you please clearly and openly explain what you mean. I am quite willing to have my ignorance fought with a clear and cogent argument.
Grocery stores are businesses that intend to make a profit.
The notion that they would create a system for the purpose of ‘saving them money’ is utterly absurd on its face. That is not the purpose of the system, and it is horribly naive to think so. They want more of your money, not less.
What this really is is targeted pricing. The next level is the brick and mortar Amazon store where there are no price tags anywhere, you just scan a code and the system tells you how the item will cost for you… based on how much the system thinks you personally would be willing to pay for it. Someone else with a different set of tracked purchases in their system will be offered a different price for the same product. This already happens all the time online but there’s something about this happening in a brick and mortar store that seems extra creepy…
We all get that coupons are just another form of advertising. Obviously the end goal is to get you to come back to the store and spend more money.
The issue here is that **Amateur Barbarian’**s smug, passive aggressive responses imply something far more devious. Since he won’t say it directly, I will assume it involves lizard men and mind control rays.
But as Smapti pointed out, OP keeps talking about “they” which could mean anything from Wal-Mart to the Illuminati. The unspecified “they” is a clear symptom of the Tin Foil Hat Brigade. Without identifying what is being tracked and who exactly is doing the tracking, all we have is vague nonsense and nonfalsifiable statements.
I’ll skip a lengthy chain of quoting here to save space and patience; the posts are only a page-scroll above.
Retail stores and their backers (resellers and wholesalers) quite simply don’t do anything for end-customer benefit, no matter how it’s dressed up or presented. Every form of sale, pricing reduction, deal, etc. benefits them, and may have fallout benefits for the customer as well. But not a one of them has an altruistic bone in their corporate charter that says, “Gosh, this cereal is too expensive for some people so let’s knock off a buck this week.”
Whether it’s a one-time price cut, a coupon or a rolling discount tied to a card, it benefits them, not you, and any benefit you receive as a customer is entirely a secondary issue - the carrot, the come-on, the pat on the head for being so darned loyal.
Think about for five whole seconds: what’s the point of tying discounts to a loyalty card? Why not just knock the same buck off for every customer, a good percentage of whom are already regulars anyway? It’s not to give a benefit to the card holders. There never used to be any such cards, and everyone who tossed Cap’n Crunch in the basket got the same feel-good sixty cents off.
But the stores didn’t know who they were.
The purpose of a club or loyalty or discount card is to allow the store to track all purchases by an individual, something they can’t do efficiently in any other way. Besides the fact that people tend to use different methods of payment over time, it’s illegal to use things like checking account and credit card numbers to tag individual customers, so they can’t do that. (The exception to that, which falls into this same general topic, is that store-issued cards can be used for such tracking. Home Depot wants to give you an HD card and have you use it because as their issue they can insert a specific clause to the agreement that lets them track your purchases with it. But that’s an aside. Grocery stores can’t.)
The amount of data that can be extracted from close tracking of a majority of customers, even if otherwise anonymous and disconnected (which it may be, but these days it’s probably specifically correlated with larger marketing databases by identity) is almost incalculably valuable… to the store, to the resellers and above all to the manufacturing conglomerates. The data you generate with your member card does NOT stay with Big Whoop Groceries & Sundries; it’s passed/sold up the chain where it becomes even more valuable as part of a larger data set. (And not necessarily for cash, but as part of the overall hands-in-each-others-pockets deal by which the manufacturers and grocery stores have operated for decades.)
Coupons and in-store pricing discounts are almost irrelevant to the function of the card except to be the carrot that gets people to use it, gladly, just as some of you above have smugly (that’s a good word) declared. Think about this for five seconds: if your store demanded an ID card for purchases and gave you nothing overt for the trouble of carrying and producing it, would you be so smug, happy or compliant? Nope. So they train you to have your Reward Card out in your damp little paw as your turn to check out approaches, because by gum and by gosh, they’re going to give you all kinds of discounts for doing so.
Discounts they could MUCH more easily make universal, as it used to be.
Even things like gas discounts and lower ticket prices at the park and such are just window dressing, carnival slum tacked on to benefit the tracking chain and store, and the participating slum providers, and make that carrot so much carrotty-er.
So next time you pull out one of those cards, be aware that it’s because it’s good for the store, not you, no matter what largely sham benefits are attributed to it.
That isn’t even the end of the story and problem. You above say things like “because it means the store gives me coupons on things I already buy” - but that’s not always quite true, is it? Sure, you’ll get a coupon on something regular, but coupons are typically for OTHER products - more expensive brand name cleaners, new gourmet frozen foods, fancy ice cream desserts, another brand of cat or dog food. Stores don’t give out coupons to lower their revenue on things they know they will already sell; manufacturers and stores issue coupons to get people to buy new and different things and hopefully add them to their regular purchases even when the price break is gone.
That’s the purpose of all the tracking, and the increasingly deep and sophisticated analysis going on at the higher levels. Everyone doesn’t get a coupon for some standard store item… each targeted, tracked and analyzed individual card holder gets coupons for things that behavioral and marketing analysis show they will be likely to buy (and switch to), given that little push.
None of this - none of it - is for your benefit any more than a local car dealer giving away free test drives or free “100-point vehicle checkups.” But you’ve been told, and conditioned to think that it’s all about giving precious you fifty cents off on ice cream. And you love 'em for it… but not nearly as much as they love you for playing their game, their way, for their benefit.
And the next level of it all is that yes, to some degree you are “matched with products and discounts you can use” - because the real purpose of all the tracking is to shape products, shelf content and store content to maximize revenue for all concerned. It’s NOT serve the most customers. NOT to maximize choice. NOT to maximize quality or selection. It’s all to make sure each store contains that center-weighted selection, arranged just so, to result in the biggest bottom line. And that’s often contrary to having the product selection and choices and “freedom” we are used to from bigger stores, where you can find obscure things even if they collect a little dust on a bottom shelf from slow sales. Or a flavor of something that only 1% of shoppers like. All those things are disappearing - I’ve watched sections of my grocery store shrink in brands and choices - and will continue to homogenize in the big-data driven crush to use customer tracking to shape the store’s offerings. Shape them - once again - not for customer benefit, but for the profit chain’s.
As for smug and passive-aggressive etc., my answers above were short because there have been any number of threads on this topic that can be looked up and re-read. I think there’s some reasonable assumption that long-timers here know the background reading, whichever side they might be on.
But there, long form. Again. For those who have managed to miss this information, which is less and less any kind of secret, especially here. My comments and others aren’t referring to some obscure illuminati secret - it’s completely open and known information, discussed widely in the trades just outside of most consumer notice, and in any large number of “airplane” books (those aren’t-we-all-clever books sold in airports for executives to read in between stops).
So, if you want to think it’s all about serving you and lavishing you with daily and special discounts - sleep tight, feel comfy, smile smugly, shop well. No, sir, we don’t carry Blueberry Ripple gelato any more. You were the only one who bought it. Can I give you a coupon for some Breyer’s Nine-Fruit Creamy GelatoBars instead?
But consumers can game the system to our benefit. One quick example; I like Rockstar Lemonade energy drink. Once a month or so my local Ralph’s (Kroger) has a 10 for $10 or even 1 for a buck with card. I buy a months supply and have never paid the undiscounted 2.49. I do the same every few weeks when pork tenderloin and ribs are half off.
How is this hurting me?
You didn’t read the above. YOU got a modest benefit that pleases you but in the end has nothing much to do with the tracking. By tying this benefit, which could just as easily be universal (all buyers) to the card, you’re giving them an endless flow from the tiny but quite value madsircool data point. That data point will be used to let them adjust their products and practices for increased profit, which may or may not be in any way that makes shopping cheaper or better for you.
Just possibly, there’s no downside in your individual future. Most of us who observe this system see it as an invasion of privacy, never a good thing, and a tool to reduce consumer choice and control. The goal is NOT to find out what the madsircool data point wants, it’s to find out what the modal number of data points want and optimize the product and presentation to them, for maximized sales and profits.
But you keep getting a great price on your drink, so all good… you believe.
Thank you for answering my queries.
It’s my job. 
Recording your shopping habits in a database and then running a query on the database and generating some shopping-related output (email) to you based on the query is not tracking. It’s marketing.
I’m going to frame this one. Thanks.
Seriously. I just quoted it into the material I’m writing. I usually have to use old examples or what-ifs to demonstrate how thoroughly people misunderstand what “marketing” is, even in these days when all the secrets are in the open and the information is a few clicks away.
But in return, I will point out that being “marketing” does not somehow make it benign, much less positive; and that using your feeble data to send you an email isn’t even the frost hair on the tip of the iceberg.
I may have linked to this New York Times Magazine article previously, but it offers one example of how companies use sales data to make predictions and market stuff to consumers.
In short, Target wanted to target pregnant women, even before the women had ever made public the fact that they’re pregnant. Studying the records of their loyalty card holders, they noted that women who were buying diapers and other baby products were, a few months earlier, buying unscented lotion and multivitamins.
So they used this information to target the coupon books they send to these customers ( technology allows them to customize the coupon book to each customer). In one case, this targeted marketing revealed to the father of a high-school-age girl the fact of her pregnancy before the girl told him.
Well, to me the downside of all the data collection boils down to this, and this is a very simplistic representation:
Say there’s 10,000 possible attributes about you.
Say having a certain combination of attributes makes you a “good guy” and another certain combination makes you a bad guy.
With reliance on data to make decisions without (an I suppose in some cases, with) human review:
- Flip one attribute, and you tip over into being a bad guy.
- What if some attributes are NULL because you opt out of giving some, is there a default? Is the default value good or bad?
- What’s considered “good” today may be considered “bad” tomorrow. This is why the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about” argument cannot fly.
I really can’t quite follow what you’re trying to argue, but there are very few working data analysis efforts that come down to one linear yes/no kind of determination.
The argument against massive data collection even ten years ago was that nothing very useful could be done with the data, since computers couldn’t handle evaluation matrices of more than X thousand records with X dozen or hundred data points, and such small bites could only produce crude, high-granularity results of questionable value.
Big data changed that. Sifting millions of records with thousands of data points can produce all kinds of very fine results, and like everything else the systems only get more powerful by the year. The smug notion “let 'em collect all this data, they can’t do anything with it and they don’t care about boring little me anyway” becomes something between horrifying and laughable - they can indeed do something with all those tiny bits of data you shed, they do care about you as a representative data point, and they can use all of it to x-ray you like a frog. And your x-ray is my x-ray… the data they collect from 20% of us results in the world 95% or more of us have to live in and with.
If it were all kind and beneficial and intended to widely distribute useful coupons and make sure your favorite flavor of Hot Pocket was always available, which is the interpretation some in here seem to have, that would be very nice. Unfortunately, all those things are merely fallout from the data harvesting, and the net results are far more detrimental to consumers as a whole than beneficial to any subset of them.
Put another way, it’s just that “data” is the new thing to worship. It has the perfume of science and math.
You can claim “the data” says anything you want.
So some people who would scoff at the idea of someone waving a piece of paper around and saying “this proves [whatever]!” will be more susceptible to an argument attributable to “the data.”
So… Stores stock products people buy? And they stop stocking products that sell poorly?
:eek::eek::eek:
Oh be still my beating heart! How totally unexpected!
Seriously, though, how is it that you need individualized customer data tracking to accomplish this? They already know what products sell well and which ones sell poorly. Any store that has even the most basic inventory management will know what products aren’t selling.
Those obscure things that collect a little dust on a bottom shelf from slow sales? Sales are slow because people don’t want to buy it. If people don’t buy something, they stop making it. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s business 101. And they didn’t need your purchase history to tell them that. The fact that they have unsold palettes of product gathering dust was probably their first clue.
So far none of the examples you have provided are anything but targeted marketing. You keep making it sound oh so nefarious, but you haven’t actually said anything that isn’t already done at the macro level. And when someone says it is marketing, you laugh at them and act like there’s some kind of big scary secret we poor naive sheeple don’t understand… but you don’t say what it is.
If businesses start making more stuff I like, and make less of the stuff I don’t like, GOOD. That’s what I pay them for! That’s how capitalism works!
So far nothing you have suggested approaches “horrifying” or “laughable.” You keep implying that they can do terrible things and “x-ray us like a frog” (Do frogs get routine x-rays? Is that something people do?). You say the results are detrimental. WHAT? EXACTLY? Drop the arrogant sheeple nonsense and actually say what you mean.
BTW WildBlueYonder, you do understand that by posting here you have created a record of online activity from your IP address. If you are trying to work on any sort of active network (cell phones, Internet) you have to provide your location to the network all the while and it will most likely get recorded. At best you can “spoof” or disguise it but that relies on the tool you use for spoofing or an important part thereof (e.g. a TOR node) not becoming itself compromised.
Yes, this is The Future. Revel in it. Sorry about the lack of jetpacks and sexdroids.
Loyalty cards and store coupons, heck, yeah, it’s for gathering data and after using it directly to target that consumer’s dollars more profitably, then being able to resell that data to others who may be interested in knowing your habits and profiting from that knowledge. I am mildly assuaged by the understanding that the vast majority of purchasers of that data are merely out to prosaically make a buck out of me without expending excessive effort, as opposed to some sort of supervillainous nefariousness.
Store cards are one thing, if you really want to worry about being tracked, worry about NSO. They can track most smartphones, listen to conversations, grab texts or any typing etc.
Currently they only sell to governments but I wonder how long that will last? Perhaps tin cans and string will come back into vogue…
Well, yes and no. There certainly is a lot of slobbery veneration at the temple of Big Data, but then, there’s a fair amount to venerate. Statistical interpretation has always been a powerful tool, especially as science advances in to more and more subtle and complex areas where results are anything but black and white. It promises to transform murky fields like climate and weather research, and, yes, economics. It has the potential to tell us things about populations and issues that can increase civic efficency and even reduce (or at least optimize) government spending and resource allocation.
Like all tools, though, it’s got at least two sharp edges, and that vast, deep insight can be used to invade privacy on both mass and individual scales. And unfortunately, the most rapid acceptance, the most growth, the most money thrown at the best minds and the primary use of big data so far has been in marketing.
What you have to remember about marketing is that it’s like the Commissioner of Baseball: it’s not there for the masses. It’s exclusively a tool of the owners, and operates entirely to benefit them, no matter how many coupons (or triple plays) might rain down on the crowds.