Don’t forget the dick wad and the greasy slab faced bint contributors.
If you get carded they’re really just looking at your DOB and maybe glancing at the picture to make sure it resembles you. They’re not putting any of that info into a database. Hell, the cashier probably won’t even remember the name on it if you asked them 30 seconds later. If it’s scanned, the store gets whatever info can be extracted from it. I have no idea what it is, but I’d guess they can get more than just your DOB from it.
It would be like the difference between a cashier asking you what state you live in vs them asking you to write down your name and address.
Modern computerized cash registers are just big database-driven applications. Among the many data tables in such an app, a POS (point-of-sale) device has a customer table, in which it records known customers’ names, internal ID numbers, mailing address, phone number, and a variety of other data. It can also include a customer’s complete line-item purchase history, house charges and payments and account status, bad-check history, credit card number (until that was made illegal). Who knows what a store might do with all that data, right?
So if the cashier just glances at a driver’s license and approves the sale, that doesn’t get recorded. But if the driver’s license is scanned, then the customer becomes known to the system, and all that information can be connected to the customer’s entry in the data table. Driver’s licenses also include the holder’s address in that mag stripe, and other data, so the cash register can grab that sort of stuff too.
Your typical customer probably doesn’t know all of the above; they are just being paranoid. And well they should be. (In retrospect, I’m kind of ashamed of myself that I ever agreed to write that kind of add-on module.)
In the old days, you’d have a circular that says sodas are on sale for $1 each. People bought them without any cards. Now they’ll have a sale but you need the card to get that lower price. Or you can buy it at a higher price if you’re not playing their game.
What is the value of the card, in dollars, to the company issuing it? In other words, they’re tracking your information and purchases, etc. so that they can make more money…how much more do they get from you?
I wonder that number of dollars is similar to Sam’s Club or Costco membership fees. You know, like those apps where it’s free (with ads) or you can pay a fee and make the ads go away? Either way they’re getting paid.
There’s to be a deeper layer now…the digital coupon. Too many guys like me have cards without any email address etc. in their files, I guess.
I guess it depends on how you pay. If you use a card, your real name is on it. How good their database is, on the other hand, I have no idea.
If you pay cash, you are right.
Would it not be enough to look at their inventories for that? If a shop sells more items of X than the other shop, they should know without the cards.
But now they know to send the coupons for similar products to that neighborhood, while another neighborhood they know to send coupons for diapers, so that they get more of their loyal customers coming back to their store.
And with every data point, they get a little bit better at knowing what people will fall for.
They aren’t collecting that data to help the customers; they’re collecting that data so they can better manipulate the customers.
Oh, and they sell that data constantly.
I count at least 2, and that’s just from the 2021 posts.