Pretty much the same kind of shopping that Green Stamps once encouraged. Anyone remember stamps? They were the loyalty cards of their day.
Me thinks you worry over much about offending.
No they weren’t, because they didn’t ask you for personally identifiable information to get them, and charge you more for your groceries if you didn’t use them. Yes, they were a loyalty program, in that they hoped the benefit of the stamps would make you choose that store rather than another, but they don’t compare at all to today’s extortion cards.
Posted by Voyager
The stores could do this already without a “loyalty” card system, all they would have to do is mine the sales data and see what products they are selling the most of certain days of the week.
Some stores track their sales this way for the reasons you noted above, and I believe Wal-Mart is considered to have the best system in this regard, but WM doesn’t require cards. Even my small local gorcery store near the house, that still prices a lot of items with tags, has a reasonably good idea of how much milk they will sell every week, and they don’t use cards
What the cards allow the stores to do is pin the purchase data to a particular shopper at a particular time, it is far more useful from the store’s perspective to know that a 35 year old white man buys a product every Thursday, versus knowing you sold that product on Thursday.
You could do what I do, which is to just get a new card every time I go in. If there’s a line, they just give you the card and the pamphlet to fill out later. I use the card and then throw both in the trash on the way out. Another favorite is to take advantage of the fact that they’ll let you key the card to your phone number. I just register a card with the phone number (xxx) 867-5309 wherever I go because it’s memorable. We should all just use that number.
Yeah, if I use my CC, they can probably link my many cards together that way, but I still have hopes that somewhere there’s a badly-coded database that my dozens of loyalty card numbers will bring down.
And to the small bookshop owner: I love loyalty cards like that.
The only place I use my “loyalty card” regularly is at Ralphs Supermarket, and the only stuff I buy there is milk, cereal, and feminine hygene pads (for the wife, natch).
I can’t imagine what the data miners make of that.
They don’t mind at all. In fact, they’re delighted that, out of those stores, you chose to shop at theirs.
Make sure you use the right one, though. One of our local cards scans as a unit of merchandise at one other store.
I’ve done some basic research on this, and I’ll hazard my speculation that if a grocery vendor like Kroger or another one of the giants that has their own dairies, lines of generics, etc has the choice of selling you their brand or a pricy name brand, they’d rather sell you one of their house brands ANY DAY.
Name brands are pricy for you, but pricy for them.
Once the price of advertising is removed, it becomes possible for a large grocery chain to actually sell you a product of equivalent quality to the highest quality name brand at a 10% savings to you while simultaneously tripling their per-unit profits.
In the case of Kroger, they have 3 different generic product lines at various price points. One of the house brands is cheap, one comes in at a medium quality level, and their highest-quality generic is commonly as good if not better than the premium competitors.
Sorry for the hi-jack.
What’s really annoying about loyalty cards is, as someone pointed out earlier, the fact that they ask you for non-demographic information. They don’t need your address and phone number and they don’t need your name. I imagine they want that information so that they can send you advertisements to induce you to come to the store, but they already send that stuff out to all potential customers in the area. I can’t see any benefit for the customer in providing contact information.
Many people dislike providing this information for both emotional and logical reasons. You can get to know the proprietor of a small business personally. You can form a personal impression or bond with that person. That person can be personally held responsible for transgressions. An organization does not provide the same opportunities. You might like the manager of the store, but he or she is not the person ultimately responsible for upholding your trust. People make decisions of trust based on reason and intangibles. Trust is always risky and people prefer to manage their risk by making sure that when they trust they have the best information available for making the decision. Supermarkets and big business conglomerates are unavoidably faceless, unaccountable, and therefore untrustworthy.
I would have no problem with providing valid demographic information like gender, age, income bracket, and even general geographic area if identifying information wasn’t also included. Demographic info all they need for good data tracking and targeting sales and that’s all they really should be asking for. Asking for more is beyond the bounds of my trust, and obviously beyond the bounds of others in this thread too.
InvisibleWombat: I think that using information to improve your business and improve service for the customer is a good reason for using a system that tracks customer purchases. But you don’t need to have identifying information to track the purchase information you’re likely to want. In setting up a database you’re going to have to have a unique identifier for each customer. It’s easier, faster, and gives less chance of a conflict if you have an automatically generated ID number for each customer. After all, you could have several customers from one household with very different tastes in books. Using a phone number or address as the ID number would not allow you to separate their purchases.
If you do ask for contact information, I suggest that you give both a reason for asking and provide a benefit to the customers for doing so. As a small business, you probably can’t afford the mass-mailings that most supermarket chains use, which provides you with a valid reason for asking for it. You could tell your customers that they can receive information about sales, special events, book signings, etc. if they provide the information. You could also give special discounts (maybe a one-time deal, maybe continuing small discounts) if they do so. As long as it is a mutually beneficial exchange, people are more likely to provide the information you ask for. However, unless you really need detailed information it might be a good idea to avoid asking for it.
You can also get some of the same benefits for yourself by point-of-sale tracking. You mentioned that you want to compare purchases by locals to those of tourists. You could make a simple database that correlates purchase information with geographic area. Zip codes are simple, fast, and general enough that most people will not be too leery of providing it. You should explain why you are requesting the information. Give them reasons to do it, provide some benefit to them, and above all give them reasons to trust you and you should have few problems.
Hmmm… I think the Soriana here may be doing the card the “right” way – the first time I shopped there, they asked if I had a card, and I told them “no.” I reconsidered my normal aversion, though – this is Mexico; I can give stupid information. So I asked for an application and the cashier just looked at me like I was stupid, and just gave me the card outright.
I’m still not sure what it’s for, though. I don’t think it’s for discounts, but then yeah, maybe. ::shrug::
That’s about the dumbest thing that I’ve heard in a while.
It is **ABSOLUTELY **their business to know what you buy, how you buy it, and when you buy it. That’s how they stay in business and make money. They’re not in this to do anything nefarious- they just want to know that say… single, renting, 32 year old men tend to buy lots of cans of soup, beer and chips, while married, renting, 32 year old men buy an entirely different set of products.
It’s a way to do better market segmentation, is all. They can collect enough data to recognize certain trends based on many variables- house owning status, marital status, age, gender, income, etc… and use it to better tailor their offerings in particular stores, based on the demographics of that area. By doing that, they hope to better serve their customers, and get more business and make more profits that way.
In a sense, it benefits the customers that they do this kind of data gathering, because they can give you better service through it.
Now as for personal identification data, I agree- that’s none of their business. It just seems like a way for them to make money by selling it, and/or sending you junk mail.
It’s my understanding that if you wish to insult me or my ideas you should do it in the Pit.
When I use the pronoun “I”, I am personally identifying myself. I think it was clear from the context of the thread and my post that I was talking about personal information, not general demographics. The forms for “loyalty” cards always ask for your name, address, phone number, e-mail address (i.e. personal information), and not just age, sex, and other non-personal demographic data.
First, as others have mentioned, they could get this information in other ways, including just asking for it without personal data, and not jacking up all prices to create phony discounts to extort the information out of their customers. Make no mistake, “loyalty” cards are not voluntary: being forced to pay an extra 15% (on average) to protect my privacy is not my idea of “volunteering.”
Second, it’s interesting you should mention market segmentation, because there is evidence that it is not necessarily the benign consumer benefit you describe.
Would you consider it nefarious if stores decided to charge poor people more and rich people less for the same products? I would. And according to this article (see “Market Segmentation” about a third of the way down), this is the direction that the loyalty cards are heading.
I always get a firmer grip on my wallet when I hear businessmen talking about how something they’re doing will benefit me, because I can be pretty sure it’s a lie that will cost me money.
Around here, the store card is used as an ID for check cashing. If you’ve shown your store card, you can write a check for groceries or more, no questions asked. If your keys, with the tag, are lost, they can be tossed in a mailbox, and the store will get them back to you. Yes, they need the address for that.
Identifying price sensitivity and market segments is nothing new. Neither is tailoring your product mix to what will make the most money. The example from your article about candy vs. baby products makes absolute sense from a business standpoint. So does the idea of cutting profitable customers breaks, while you don’t cut breaks to people you’re not likely to make money from.
Make no mistake, these companies(and all companies really) were organized with one purpose: to make money for their owners, be they public or private. They’re not in it to provide you with anything beyond what will make them money. They don’t owe you variety, they don’t owe you a fair price (hell, coupons do the same damn thing as these cards, except they’re self-selecting), they don’t owe you anything. If you don’t like them, their pricing strategies, their variety, or their policies, it’s pretty damn simple; don’t shop there. That’s the fastest way to get the point across.
Ultimately though, market segmentation will provide what’s most profitable for the store, which also is what’s perceived as most valued by consumers. Basic economics, mixed with a tad of marketing.
Sounds like a pretty cynical overgeneralization to me.
Most businessmen are practical folks just like everyone else. With my business, I know that when I come up with something that benefits my customers, they’ll generally buy more from me. That makes me money. If I do something that hurts them, they notice it pretty quickly and take their money elsewhere. They’re smart folks.
No, they don’t. There are several other ways to verify ID. If people want to use it for that purpose, that’s fine, but being forced to provide that information when a driver’s license or other form of ID could be used instead is invasive. It’s also much more likely that the information on a driver’s license will be accurate and up to date than that which is kept in the company database, as well as being much more difficult to counterfeit. Being able to get your keys back if you lose them is a nice extra, assuming an unlikely chain of events (the keys are lost in the store, or returned to the store by someone, and you did not drive and did not realize upon returning home and and finding yourself locked out that the likely place the keys were lost was the grocery store) but the invasion of my privacy for the hypothetical long-shot case is not worth it. I don’t want to be forced to provide information so that Susie Smith or Joe Average can get her or his keys back. That’s not even remotely related to the stated purpose of the cards and they do not need that information for improving their business.
Here’s a related issue. When I was at university, our school ID number was our SSN. In my second year there, I did some research on identity theft after seeing a few news stories and found out, after digging around for a week or so, that it was possible to get a randomly assigned school ID number, but that you had to request it at the time you got the ID or face having problems with student loans, mixed up grade records, etc. The option to have a random ID number was not disclosed by the school, and getting one was tacitly discouraged by making it so difficult to find out that it was even possible. On top of this, if you bought something at the student store and paid with a check, they wrote your driver’s license number and your student ID number on the check.
So here you have your SSN, your driver’s license number, your bank account number and branch information, your address, and probably your phone number all in the same place. The only other piece of information an identity thief could possibly need that would not be provided right there on that one check would be your mother’s maiden name. With that information, someone would have a very easy time finding out your account balance and other financial information. A conversation with the school ombudsman and the manager of the student store did nothing to change the situation and I wasn’t willing to become an activist, so unfortunately I let it go aside from refusing to write my student ID on checks at the store. I regret that now. I should have done something more.
Whether or not they ever do anything unethical with the information they gather, businesses and institutions should have an obligation to provide at least some protection from disclosing personal information. In some cases they are already under legal obligation to do so and no one has challenged them on it yet. The first and easiest step in protecting information that should be kept private is not to ask for any information that is not absolutely necessary. It’s hard to misuse information when you don’t have it to begin with, and keeping that information out of the database also keeps employees and management from dishonestly using it for personal gain. That’s a bonus for the business in that they don’t have to disassociate the business from a criminal employee somewhere down the line.