Q.E.D. I’m a girl 
So, I’m correct in my ID requiring procedures, but I don’t ask them to sign their cards. That’s none of my business.
I work for a fairly large retail chain, whose official policy is to check all signatures against the card, if the card does not have a signature then request id, if the id does not match the card…even for trivial reasons…spouses card or some such we are expected to refuse the card for transaction.
I personally have refused credit cards on this basis.
They are used instead of signatures for most purposes, but not for credit cards.
There are a number of problems with the hanko (stamp). First, they can be stolen and used by someone else. People often foolishly store their bankbooks and hanko together, and then thieves can withdraw money from the bank account.
Second, they can be used without permission. At my previous company, we used to “borrow” our boss’s hanko to authorize purchases when he wasn’t around. Of course we would tell him about afterwards, but people have gotten divorced without knowing about it because their spouses have used the hanko.
And, as the article points out, it’s getting easier to forge hanko.
I have two distinct signatures. One for work and one for personal. I have to send out my work signature to tons of places. I want to make sure that no one ever takes a signature from one source to the other.
As I understand, the general use for collection information from your “savings card” for a grocery store is not to collect information about you grocery habits per se, but so the store can sell what is essentially demographic information to a mailing party who will then send you junk mail.
Man, I recall years ago this got a lot of people in a tizzy. Fortunately or not, the stuff that used to be published (on this site, among others) has dropped off, here’s what’s left, but I recall there being a group dedicated to stopping those cards. This is probably too tin hattish for y’all though:
http://www.rense.com/general27/yourgrocerylist.htm
http://www.rense.com/general36/shio.htm
And since you are going to make fun of me anyway: http://www.rense.com/general11/end.htm
Actually, Albertson’s in my town thinks that Anastacia Beaverhausen, who lives on my street but at a different (non-existent) number. That’s my grocery store alias. I use the same zip code so it doesn’t screw up their marketing too much.
That should read that “… Anastacia Beaverhausen, who lives on my street but at a different (non-existent) number, bought all my groceries.”
No edit button yet? What am I paying my $5 for?!? 
I usually save quite a bit when I use my discount card(s). The discount I get makes up for having one more piece of junk mail to throw in the trash about 10,000 times over.
I worked for a company that specializes in consumer statistics (it’s a common company, you could guess it if I said they also do TV show ratings ), and they used (bought?) these consumer statistics. A company like Coca-Cola would put a new product in the store, and they would track the buying habits of the consumers (how well is it selling compared to X?, did packaging type A work better than packaging type B?, an so on).
Where did I say you could ask for ID anytime, other than when the card isn’t signed?
Cite? 
OK Q.E.D, your right, I’m wrong. Now, let’s move on.
Fair enough.
:d
Well since I have 99 posts in this thread already, what the hell, one more won’t hurt.
I never sign my full name … just initials, unless its a legal document. Then I can say nope that was forged they signed Christina, hell I can even spell it without stopping to think.
My credit card was issued to my alias Kris and I started to sign it in pen C. D. then said oh crap. So I signed the alias over top of it with a sharpie. I have had it questioned only once and that was by the friend of my sister’s ex-husband. And she was delighting in causing me trouble.
The dimwit manager says “there’s TWO signatures on this card” Yeah no shit, thats what your cashier just said.
I looked at the manager and said “You have two seconds to clear this transaction or I start screaming, and baby, you have never seen a tantrum until you see me throw a tantrum!”
Yeah, I was out of there pronto… good old Walmart…
Just so it’s clear – I’m not pointing fingers and laughing. However, your phrase “nefarious purposes” did make me smile. The only purpose organizations have for gathering purchase data is to try to figure out ways to get you (and others) to buy even more from them.
Most retailers, catalogers, banks, etc., if they are at all on top of things, collect as much purchase information as possible. Things like “who bought what from which store during what timeframe”. They do this because if they know your purchase habits, then they can create marketing campaigns to try to get you back into the store to buy some more.
They can also look at your demographic to see if they have other customers who are similar to you who might be tempted to buy what you have bought. If you’re in your mid-20s and married and you buy baby clothes, they’ll check to see who else in their database is in their mid-20s and married. If they haven’t come into the store to buy baby clothes, they might consider sending them a coupon for baby clothes.
As you mention, Loyalty Cards or proprietary credit cards are the best way for companies to do this. It’s harder to do with national cards like Visa and MasterCard because the ability to match the purchase back to the customer becomes more difficult.
Further along on the difficulty scale is paying by check. Most organizations don’t have the time to try to match a purchase by check with anyone in their customer database. A notable exception to this that I’ve noticed is Radio Shack. They try to get your name and address regardless of how you pay. Even by cash.
Paying by cash or check pretty much will assure you that what you purchased is not going to find its way into their Marketing Database. These are called “orphaned transactions”. So named because they can’t match the transaction with its “parent” customer.
Any other means of payment will find its way into the database. But even then, due to recent privacy laws in the US, this detailed purchase information won’t go outside the walls of that corporation.
As far as the OP is concerned, the electronic signature is not stored in any marketing database that I’m aware of. What would be the point? It won’t help them sell more stuff.
Bottom line is that the purchase data collected by stores is not used for any nefarious purpose. Unless of course you categorize attempts to sell you more as nefarious.
And this makes the manager a dimwit how? Suppose you lost your card, and someone did what you did–sign another signature on top of the existing one. Would you really want someone putting the charge through and costing you at least $50 in the process? You were wrong. You should have requested a new card and signed it properly. Throwing temper tantrums because a store manager tried to follow correct procedure doesn’t make you look too good.
No, your little temper tantrum would not have worked on me.
Yeah, I kinda do, actually. I think Big Business sticks its nose into my business far too much already.
Now, I’m probably ready for my own tinfoil-hat fitting, but imagine a scenario where you want to fall off the radar, but everywhere you go and everything you do leaves behind an electronic fingerprint of yours. I think what bothers me is not that I have any intention of needed to fall off the radar, but the fact of how difficult that has become in so many small, unnoticed, creeping ways. My own brand of paranoia says that the small, unnoticed, creeping changes can be the most dangerous.
I don’t follow. What’s so dangerous?