I bop over to my local supermarket, in the mood for a snack. I’m cruising down the aisle, hoping to spot something on sale that I can stuff my face with…
OH, NO, NO, NO!
All the sales items are now only available if I get a supermarket “card”! If I just give them my full name, address, phone number and e-mail address!
Excuse me? I’m not marrying you, I’m not entering into a limited partnership, I JUST WANT SOME F****** FOOD! Without my privacy being compromised.
Did it occur to you, ALBERTSON’S that maybe people came to your stores partly to avoid the same intrusive horseshit from friggin’ SAFEWAY?
Oh, I don’t really need the card? I’m free to compare prices just as before, only now I have to use all the undiscounted prices? So if I want my privacy, you arseholes just effectively raised my shopping bill by %20! Twenty percent!! Yes, the same amount you used to gleefully tell me I’d saved on the receipts.
Oh, and not to mention that one reason I moved to this neighborhood was that your market was 1 block away. And that now the nearest market is 7 blocks away. Screw capitalism.
If I get the card, you’re going to hit me with advertising that’s worth $15 a week to you and whoever else you give my personal information out to. You fuckers. I’ll shop somewhere where, if the food’s more expensive, at least the veggies aren’t flacid.
While in line you can usually get someone else to use their card on your behalf. Some places let you just punch in the phone number of someone with a card. Find a person with the card and use their phone number. They don’t verify the information so lie to them to get the card. This last one may just be King Soopers.
However if you already have a credit card, internet service, video rental card or carry pennies They know all about you so you may as well just give up trying to hide from Them and just grin and bear it.
Yeah, what The Tim said. Usually those cards will rack up points for the customer, so if you use a friend’s card, you get cheaper groceries, and your friend gets more points that’ll add up to later discounts or other good crap. They may even have a spare card- some store give out one wallet-sized card and two keychain ring cards.
Oh, wait, this is the pit. Those fuckers! Oh wiat, I work for one of 'em. Us fuckers!
Where’s your patriotism? Don’t you know those cards are a valuable tool in the War On Fre… uh, Terrorism? Those cards are now used by government agencies to determine whether you have terroristic grocery-buying habits, so that federal agents can kick down your door and beat the crap out of you if they catch you buying too much pita bread or hummus or whatever it is terrorists eat.
Uh, and I thought I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek. This is from the article Bob Scene cited, above:
"Regulars at a national grocery chain, these thousands and thousands of shoppers used the store’s preferred-customer cards, in the process putting years of their lives on file … Instead, says the company’s privacy consultant, the data was used by government agents hunting for potential terrorists.
… a federal agency involved in espionage actually did a rating system of almost every citizen in this country," Ponemon claims. “It was based on all sorts of information—public sources, private sources. If people are not opted in”—meaning they haven’t chosen to participate—“one can generally assume that information was gathered through an illegal system.”"
Ok, I’m ready for ya! How many American History majors have joined Al-Koolaida, officer?
You people really need to get a life. If you don’t want to give them your information, then make do without the discount and quit complaining. Nobody’s putting a gun to your head and demanding you hand over your precious profile.
I refuse to use a store card, and I don’t want to pay high prices, either. But I’ve discovered something. In the stores I frequent, the cheapest priced versions of an item rarely become discounted for card-carriers, and the discount on a name-brand item rarely brings the price down to the regular price on another brand.
Too complicated? Let’s try a hypothetical example. Noodles, Brand A, 1 lb box, regular price 1.00. Card-only discount today is .80. Sounds good, right?
But look just below, Brand B noodles, same size are regularly $.65. If you took the bait (or the noodles) and were swayed by the big discount sticker, you actually paid MORE than I did!
So every time I see a discount card-only sticker, I look a little harder. 80% of the time I find a better price.
The sales slips have a line for “If you had used our card, you would have saved $…” (Mine usually say “0.00") What they need is a line that says, "Because you used our card, you paid … too much.”
To add to what Musicat says, I’ve noticed here in Galveston that even if you were to pay the discount prices at Randall’s and Kroger, you’d still be paying more (in some cases several times as much) as what you’d pay for the same brand at Wal-Mart or HEB, where they don’t have the cards. I’ve never been able to figure out what could possibly motivate someone to shop at Randall’s instead of HEB.
I’m usually a privacy freak. I’m still steamed with the appologists for that kid who unlocked his Dad’s filing cabinet in “pot, porn, dad post.”
But for some reason this card thing doesn’t bug me. I don’t believe “they” or the store chain are keeping track of what we buy. I don’t think they care. The chains just want to lock us in to buying at their store. That’s why they give that 5 or 10% discount when you buy something like $300.00 worth of groceries.
You shouldn’t get the cards with fake info, they are just as bad as giving them your name and address to begin with. As a matter of fact, you should refuse to patronize stores that use those programs at all. Musicat is right about them charging you more even with the card, not even considering the privacy issues.
There is more information about the cards on this site:
I work for a store who had these things at one time. We were the first chain in the area to have them. Now we are the first (and only, so far) store to have gotten rid of them.
Now we advertise that you don’t need a card to get the sale prices.