Die grocery store, die.

The BBQ Pit
1

WARNING: THIS RANT MAY SOUND STUPID AND PETTY.

So I’m shopping for groceries yesterday and get all of my crap up to the checkout, the girl is running it through, rings up the total, and asks:

“You got a Preferred Customer Card?”

“Um, no.”

“That’ll be an obscene amount of money for what you bought.”

The store started this thing this week, and it appears to be an excuse for the store to jack up prices in order to catch people (Me) who don’t have a card and make them pay more. So I ask where I can get a card. The gum chewing girl of my dreams points to the customer service desk. I get an application.

Here is what they want to know about me:

Name, address, home and work telephone numbers, e-mail address, names of other family members, amount of money I make, and whether I own my own home.

WHAT THE FUCK? It’s like I’m applying for a damned credit card. I was pissed. Not angry. Not upset. Pissed. And not a normal pissed. This is a fart in the Volkswagen pissed. This is a failure to flush after taking the dump pissed. I filled it out and lied about everything but my name. The manager of the store used his card to scan my stuff until my card arrived at my home. Well, whoever lives at the address I picked out can have it.

Being me, I went home and dug out my old receipts for this store and compared them to my new “savings.” Prices on the items were the same as the “Specially Priced” items. Exactly. To the penny. So my card actually “saves” me nothing more than a shafting.

The “special” deal on soda brought the price down to the same price it was before they started this program. Ditto cheese, salsa, chips, bread, and milk. Fucking hoodlums.

It appears that if I don’t have a card I don’t deserve to get a good price on the things I buy. So let me say this, you fucks:

I will not shop in your fucking store. I won’t even piss on the sidewalk in front of it. This is the grocery store equivalent of a subway mugging. I despise this trend of “VIP” cards and everything that it represents. If I had the time I’d organize a protest in front of your fucking store and march and shout and day nasty shit until the customers were terrified to come into the parking lot, much less the store.

I don’t want you to know who I am, where I live, how much I make, or my phone number. I want you to sell me the things I need at the best possible price so that I shop with you instead of your competitor, though you’ve lost that battle for good.

I have no desire to be put on your fucking mailing list; I get enough junk mail already. I really don’t need you to call me at work to tell me that tomatoes are on special today. I certainly don’t need you jacking up the prices on the products you sell unless I give you personal information about myself.

If I knew who came up with this idea I’d kick him in the fucking nuts.

2

Meet C.A.S.P.I.A.N.

3

FOAF alert:

I once heard from someone that got one of those cards from a store known to do purchase tracking, filled it out as a 25 year old female, and then only used it to buy “personal lubricant”, Depends, and ketchup. Don’t know if it is true, but it’s funny as all heck if enough people actually did that just to mess up the store’s records. (What? The biggest product for the 20-25 range is Depends?)

4

Is that German?

5

Don’t get mad, get even.

In other words, lie.

I believe I filled out my Rainbow Foods Preferred Customer Card as a 55 year old man living at 6969 Lucky Lane. IIRC, my phone number was also XXX-XXX-6969.* Hell, I had the check-out chick helping me make stuff up :smiley:

Joke 'em if they can’t take a fuck.

[sub]*Note: I am not a man, not 55, and I don’t believe there is a Lucky Lane in my hometown.[/sub]

6

Hehe, I’m Bob B. Bobb at 12345 6th st #789

I’ve often wondered if there is an actual email adress at bobbobb@bob.com cause me and all my friends have been using it as our fake email for years. Some poor guy has been getting a shitload of wierd spam if there is.

7

The village voice just ran an article on another evil of these shopping cards: using them as another “red-flagging” tool for home security.

Basically, the cards are used to keep track of a customer’s buying habits. And now, participating grocery stores are turning these lists over to the government to see if they can be used in identifying possible terrorists.

I am never, EVER applying for one of these things!

8

[sub]I’m a marketer. I like them.[/sub]

We have a card for just about every store we ever go to. Safeway, Fry’s, Basha’s (where we NEVER shop), SteinMart, PetCo… I LIKE demographic-based marketing. I LIKE it when SteinMart sends me 25% off coupons for my birthday. I LIKE getting a 5% or 10% off my next shopping trip coupon after I spent $250 at Safeway. I don’t mind them knowing what I buy at all. I like the idea of targeted advertisements and discounts, and also the knowledge that maybe I’m helping one of my favorite products stay on the shelves.

I hope none of you who hate them belong to Costco or Sam’s Club. Same basic thing - but you PAY them for the privilege of collecting your info.

9

:eek:

I don’t even think CSIS is trying anything like that, let alone a grocery store up here.

They make you get a card to go into Price Club, sure, but they just look at it on your way in.

10

I’m somewhat sympathetic to Safeway et. al… tracking buying trends (many people who usually buy ivory soap switched to this new brand x), or using aggregate data to see that people who buy flour and syrup often buy eggs too, seems reasonable. I’m sure there are many legitimate uses for this data. (There are optimized algorithms for finding out exactly these relationships for most databases)

On the one hand, the store wants you to give them this data, and unless you use the card (whether forced to a la Costco, or encouraged to as in Safeway), they don’t get it.

On the other, at our local store, cake is often on “sale” for 4$, “regular price” 10$. At this point even I grumble that they might as well sell everything for 5 million and mark it down at the register.

If the card was completely anonymous and included only a unique id, it would still get them this information. Like you, I had to lie to keep the rest of my personal information private. Safeway is trying to prevent this by entering people in little contests when they buy stuff, to be delivered by mail if they win (so that info has to be correct).

Ahem. Enough rant. :slight_smile:

11

Every price club I’ve ever belonged to (Sam’s, Costco, and BJ’s) has scanned your card at checkout.

12

Whenever I’m asked for my address by someone from whom I do not want any mail, I always use the same address. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC. No one, and I mean no one, has ever noticed. Including the gal who asked me to spell it out because my handwriting was so bad.

13

You do know that the grocery store is making money off of those ‘personal shopper cards’. They can tabulate lists of what products people buy which is then sold to marketing research companies…

There was one grocery store near where i went to college that had those. Each time I bought grocerys I said i’d like one of their shop 'n save cards. :slight_smile:

I had over 40 cards by the time they stopped giving new ones to me

14

I don’t mind cards when having one gets you the occasional very decent price. Let them gather my demographics. They are mind-staggeringly dull. Let them drown in information. I’m fairly sure you don’t have to do a lot of data mining to figure out that someone who buys pasta also buys spaghetti sauce. (If my purchases ever consisted of baby oil, condoms, whipped cream and 500 packets of vanilla pudding, I’d probably leave the card in my wallet.) As the OP noted, when they jack up the normal prices for people who don’t have cards – well, I don’t shop at that store very often. And when I do, their “Save club” cards are warning beacons shouting “you will be ripped off on this product.”

15

This is why I don’t go Krogering anymore.

When they first started the magic-pixie-card program there would be stickers on the shelves touting the huge savings you could get by being one of the card people. In the store I went to I noticed the new stickers had been placed over the old price stickers. Curious, I peeled off the new stickers to take a peek. What they had done was jack up the price on all the products to make the savings look big when in fact you were saving very little.

Bah.

16

My card name is Fister Macgillicutty. I live at 666 satan lane.
I got my stupid “We won’t overcharge you as much” card a couple years ago. A few weeks ago I was behind some guy who was getting a wwoam card. They checked his licence to make sure he filled it out accurately. The bastards.
It is every citizens duty to skew the data as much as they can.

17

Truly evil.

Even more evil: Airmiles-- Pass on information about your purchases at a variety of places, to make it easier for marketing types to hit you with direct-mail/telephone campaign.

What bugs me about it is that anyone who can pay for it can obtain detailed and specific information. It’s one thing if you receive a brochure from a bank offering renovation loans because they bought a list of everyone who’d bought lumber in a particular area recently. What’s to keep some psycho from finding out who’s been buying sex toys with their credit-card and going door-to-door with a baseball bat? Or any number of other unpleasant scenarios? If you’re willing to pay for it, that information is anybody’s. (Assuming there’s a category for it in the UPC code scheme?)

18

I have one of those cards, and for every $250 I spend on groceries at their store, they send me a grocery coupon for $10. I save up 6 or 7 of those coupons, and my next weekly shopping trip is basically free. It feels great to walk out after a shopping trip and only have spent $4.96 out of pocket for a $74.96 shopping tab. So, I don’t mind giving them my real address, after all they are only tracking the boring things I buy - the grocery store stuff. And sometimes I do save money on the stuff they have on special for card holders.

19

Unless you’re paying cash, its child’s play to create the marketing profile without the aid of a store card - checking acct. & credit cards are trackable, too.

Grin and bear it or lie - there’s very little they don’t know about you already.

20

If you read the CASPIAN site, you find out that those “savings” are often times higher than they were before the store started the card. Yep, they actually raise the card prices and call that a savings, whereas before, you could get the savings without having to give up personal information.

Unless of course, you shopped here, in which case the government now also knows what you buy. Better watch those purchases of couscous, fertilizer and cleaning supplies before you get red-flagged.

Serious questions for those who like the cards:

  1. Would you use the cards if you could get the sale price without them?

  2. How far would you allow the stores to go in invading your privacy? Kroger is starting to implement fingerprint identification that will tie your credit card information into it. I’m pretty sure the law enforcement officials would love to get their hands on that database. I’ve never committed a crime in my life, but I sure don’t want the government to have my fingerprints on file.