What do I care if Kroger knows what I buy there? I want them to know. That way, they’ll keep stocking what I want, and even give me coupons for it.
My card at Marsh was simply handed to me, no questions asked. No ID, no address.
There are lots of good reasons to be suspicious and angry about privacy. Grocery store cards are not in that category, in my opinion.
Fine print on a community card handled only by the cashier is almost certainly not binding.
And for anyone who doesn’t want to be in the database, are you buying everything with cash? If you use a check or credit card, you’re offering plenty of identifying information.
Exactly. The data collection may - probably does - happen at some chains, but the chief financial benefit is price discrimination. It’s a way to charge lower prices for people who care enough to shop around and carry a card, but make it just inconvenient enough that everyone else pays the normal amount. Segment the customers into two groups, and charge them different amounts. Economics 101.
I’m no expert in the realm of civil law, but I don’t believe this story. There’s an insufficient nexus between buying lots of of alcohol and a slip-and-fall to permit that to be used as evidence. The store would have to have evidence that the plaintiff was drunk or otherwise impaired at the time he slipped and fell.
sigh
Cite?
I should have known better than to say something like that.
I admit my ignorance, and request enlightenment.
Wouldn’t acceptance of terms require actually knowing that they exist?
What’s to prevent a fundamentalist/evangelical Christian group from masquerading as a food producer, and getting a list of anyone who has bought Manichewitz products? Now that they have a list of all the Jews in an area, they can go out and launch an aggressive proselytization campaign targeting them. What’s to stop a Nazi hacker from getting the data?
They are gong to be some disappointed Nazi Hackers when they discover my garlic matzo addiction.
Except in my case their stupid-ass employees are on the verge or harrassing. I try to be polite, but I want to shout out that, “Hey! I don’t work here or anyplace comparable! Your $0.20 is worthless to me!” But that’s rude, because their attitudes are such that to them the itty bitty savings are the most important thing in the world. I don’t want to be a snob. But I hate the feeling of denying a quarter to a panhandler every time I want a gallon of milk.
They don’t need individual data for that, though. “Hey! We always sell out of rib primals the week before Christmas. Maybe we should stock more that week!” Yeah, facile example, but that’s all the data they need. I always faithfully bought every serrano they stocked, but it wasn’t good enough. Now they don’t sell serranos and I have to settle for jalepeños (if I plan bad and don’t get them someplace else). All of the individual data becomes agregate data anyway, 'cos that’s all they need.
Back to even sven’s comment again – with the competition, they’re actually losing out by focusing on the higher profit for convenience, at least in my case. So every once in a while they make an extra $0.20 they otherwise wouldn’t make. If they attracted me as a full time customer to purchase everything but the “I need this in a hurry” type of stuff, they would gain so much more. The fact that they harp on you about the card so much (at this location anyway) must eliminate any advantage that it supposedly has. I mean, unless I’m the only intelligent person that ever shops there – is that their plan? I’ve got to admit I see nicer cars (meaning higher income meaning more intelligent???) at Nino Salvaggios.
Am I the only one who doesn’t care if someone is tracking my purchases?
If you’re going to nail me for picking up a Playboy somewhere… wait, if you were going to nail me, I probably wouldn’t have needed the Playboy in the first place.
You are living in a universal second when your risk of getting tortured or killed for being who you are is very low. This started very recently and could end any day. Do you think people who did not care if anybody tracked what they bought in Imperial Russia felt the same way after the Bolshevik revolution? That wasn’t an issue back then, but if the capability was there I’m sure hundreds of people would’ve been killed based on their Safeway Club Card records.
I have an extra Kroger card, if you want it. I get a 10c discount per gallon at my local Kroger for every $100 spent at Kroger using my card, so I’d be happy to share the card with anyone who wants to help me save a little gas money. (I drive a paid-off minivan, so every penny I can get toward gas purchases is a definite plus.)
Kroger also lets me go online and add electronic coupons to the card. All I have to do is present my card, and I get discounts on the products I’ve downloaded “coupons” for. Since I don’t buy very many of those products, the trade-off would be that you can have the coupons if I can have the gasoline discount.
I also have a Kroger GiftCard that I add money to on a regular basis. The GiftCard was issued to me by my daughter’s marching band, and Kroger actually donates something like .5% of the value of purchases I make with the card to my daughter’s marching band fund. To me, this is free money, since we have to pay about $300/year in marching band fees. If Kroger is willing to pay part of that for me (to date, Kroger has paid nearly $55 in fees for us–not a lot, but more than nothing), just for using their GiftCard for purchases that I would make anyway, I’ll definitely take it.
We have a Kroger and a Super Walmart literally right next door to each other, and every week, I go to both stores. I like the Kroger store brands better than the WalMart store brands in terms of taste, and Kroger usually has better produce–both in terms of quality and price. Since I will shop at Kroger every week (and even more often, since there is a Kroger on my way home from work), I don’t have a problem with putting their store card on my key chain. It really doesn’t take up any room at all, and I don’t really care if Kroger knows how much I spend, since they give me so much money back.
I also have a card for PetSmart, but I never filled out the customer information card. I put it on my keychain, so I don’t have to keep track of where it is, but I still get the discounts.
All hail progressive society.
By the way, I lied when I said I wouldn’t buy the Playboy anyway. It really does have good articles.
Nothing. They wouldn’t even have to masquerade; the data is available for purchase to anybody.
They probably just aren’t smart enough to do that. But now that you’ve told about it… 
But they would have to be prepared for a lot of false positives, people like even sven who like a specific jewish food. Back when airlines served meals, it was common to request the Kosher meal, because it was often better quality than the regular airline food. If you assumed that passengers who ordered the Kosher meal were jewish, you would have a lot of false positives in your data!
For more info about the downside of supermarket “loyalty” cards, see here: CASPIAN: Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering. I recommend their FAQ.
“Loyalty” programs raise prices of all goods to offset the millions of dollars that the computers, software, and workers needed to administer the programs cost the stores. The programs’ “discount” prices are usually higher than the regular prices that stores without card programs offer. The prices on the vast majority of other products are even higher.
Apparently not, or there would be a greater outcry against them. Personally, it’s my attitude that, even if I don’t have anything to hide, it’s none of their damn business what I buy. I refuse to gently accede to the constant and insidious nibbling away at my privacy by all sectors of society.
So, only because there are no stores without cards within a reasonable distance of my home, I reluctantly have two “loyalty” cards (obtained with false information), and I only pay for groceries with cash, so that there’s no connection with my debit/credit cards. The same is true for my Barnes and Noble card. Call me paranoid if you like, but that’s been my practice since these cards were introduced.
Now for those who have no concern about merchants tracking all their purchases, would you feel the same way about the government having all that information? Shortly after 9/11, a major supermarket chain, without being asked, turned over a vast amount of its customer purchasing data to the government in the hope it would “help capture the terrorists.” (This was reported by CASPIAN, and I believe it’s somewhere on their site.)
The recent revelations about the government’s attempts to get Web search information should provide proof, if any was needed, that if someone is collecting personal information, eventually everyone, including the government, will have it.
Now does anyone have any suggestions for Googling anonymously?
No, it’s precisely their business to know what you buy. They used to do it in aggregate, and have okay data. Now they do it by individuals, and have great data. A store in my neighborhood recently started carrying all sorts of (to my mind) “weird” specialty goods – several of which I had given up on ever seeing in a grocery store again.
I won’t call you paranoid – I do the same. But even without personally identifying info, the profile they have of me is a useful data point that (computer costs aside) ends up saving me money because I’m a penny-pincher.
Amen! Preacher, turn your head a little – the tenors can’t hear you.
Tor and Privoxy, hand in hand.
I use Scroogle.
What’s to stop a proselytizer or a neo-Nazi from waiting outside the synagogue and seeing who goes in or out? That’d probably actually be more convenient, because then you can hand out your Chick tracts or firebombs or whatever right on the spot. Yes, there are many ways in which our modern world isn’t private, but there have always been a lot of ways in which life isn’t private.
Computers make it much simpler to automate a police state. (Remember, even IBM “assisted” the Nazi’s with their accounting of the Jews.)
I am really, really disappointed in how many people don’t understand how evil these things are. They do you no good, can cause lots of harm, etc.
An “anonymous” card is useless if you buy something with a credit card or a check just once.
Remember, there’s a lot of bad corporations out there, there are far, far more bad people working for corporations. What if in the middle of a divorce, your soon-to-be ex’s lawyer had a “buddy” working for one of the data factories that process this info “take a peek” into your buying activities (but your lawyer had ethics and didn’t do likewise). You would be at a significant disadvantage. What were you doing buying a quart of baby oil at 10 on a Saturday night anyway?
Also, as a long time computer geek, I know that errors abound. What if the computer says you bought 1000 issues of “Transexual Monthly”? Try convincing a judge to give you custody when that shows up as exhibit “A”.
(Plus there’s the idiotic idea that if I shop at 50 stores I need 50 “disloyalty” cards.)
Please, take if from the computer folk. Don’t shop at stores that use these.