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?
