I DON"T WANT another DAMNED card in order to "save money" at your store!

[sidhechaos]

@Smeghead

This is what gets me. I don’t have fears about privacy or tracking or whatnot - it’s mildly irritating, I suppose, but generally so what? No, the thing that irritates me is that these card systems OBVIOUSLY cost a fair bit of money to operate. Therefore, they are generating more money than they cost, or stores wouldn’t be using them. Now, stores have exactly one source of income - you and the other customers. To recap: stores with cards make more money than stores without cards, and that money is ultimately coming out of your pocket.

And yet, despite these self-evident facts, otherwise reasonably intelligent people STILL buy in to the nonsense crap the stores trumpet about how the cards actually SAVE you money! They clearly don’t. The stores say they do, sure. Of course they say that. But jacking up prices and then sending you an occasional coupon doesn’t count as saving money - it just makes you feel like you’re saving money, which is all that really matters.

Or, for a more concrete example of how stores bullshit us, a few months ago in my local card-issuing store, there was a sign up proudly announcing that using our cards now earned us 10 cents off a gallon of gas for every $100 we spent! YAY! What good news, right? Except that up until that point, we had been getting 10 cents off per gallon for every $50 we spent. This is the kind of crap stores do all the time, all over the place.

there are exactly two stores I can shop at where I live. Kroger and walmart. If I want to shop anywhere else I have a 120 mile round trip drive.

I can go to walmart and buy a specific set of groceries and it comes to a certain amount. often the perishable goods are of poor quality.

I go to kroger and buy the exact same goods, I save money, I can get reduced cost on my gas, and occasionally get coupons for free things I would have bought anyway and had to pay for (like eggs and butter). if the coupon is not something I normally buy, it isn’t used. oh, and the perishable goods are always better quality.

all of that vs OMG they know I drink goat milk instead of cow milk?

Regardless of what you say, looking at my budget (and since I’m disabled it’s a TIGHT budget) I’m winning, not to mention a couple of the employees will put back marked down items (like that terrible expensive goat milk) if it gets marked down a day they know I’m coming in, so I can save even more.

mine is probably a rare case, but I can SHOW on my budget and with reciepts I am spending less.

[sidhechaos]

@Amateur_Barbarian

One of the things I haven’t bothered to respond to is this kind of simplistic straw man argument. You’re free to go back through my posts and see where I said choosing one brand over another is some kind of manipulation or a conspiracy. One of you makes such a dippy claim, then another one pipes up to agree that it’s nonsense.

Picking one brand of ice cream over another, or any such choice, barely registers on the scale of effect I’m actually talking about. When you can grasp that I’m not talking about what brand of beer you have in your fridge or whether or not you ran out to buy something you saw advertised on TV, you might get what I actually am saying.

Or not. I certainly don’t give a shit if you do.

I don’t know anyone personally who has the skills, time or means to live entirely self sufficient, even the Amish are reduced to purchasing some items. I don’t see how purchasing life necessities like food and clothing is being conned unless you have discovered some way of having everything given to you scot free. Do people spend money above what they need to such as super fancy ridiculous priced smart phones with equally inflated provider plans? yes (my food bill is probably less than some peoples phone plans)

thing is, money does you no good in the grave, so it is not unreasonable to occasionally buy something that is not absolute necessity but rather a luxery, as long as you stay within your means. where people get conned is living beyond their means and getting sucked into credit problems, that and the fact that there should be a certain limit to how much profit companies can make, especially on itms that are essential. Its criminal for a drug company to charge 900 dollars for a month supply of heart meds it costs them 12 bucks to make. Most countries do cap that kind of thing, yes here in the US we get screwed on it. In general however, your arguement and lack of expanding on it doesn’t make much sense.