Loyalty cards--invasive and expensive

A friend and I had a "discussion" about loyalty cards today. Actually, it was pretty darn close to an argument. I don't use loyalty cards or coupons at the grocery store; I don't play games with my food. And that's what it is--a game to convince the consumer she's getting something for nothing, that retailers are just in business to please you and give their products away. Whether it's the wooden nickle, the green stamp, the sweepstakes game, the paper coupons in the size of a dollar, or the plastic loyalty card that looks like a credit card, the intent is to get you to buy. What I find so insidious about the loyalty card is not just that they can find out what you buy--they could do that without your personal information. It's that your personal information is sold, and that's more lucrative than knowing 1500 boxes of Betty Crocker 14 oz. mashed potato flakes sold on Nov. 20 in the Main St. store (except to Mrs. Bruce who bought 5 lbs of real potatoes for the same price) or 700 cans of Stokley's green beans without salt. Kroger is part owner of a data mining company. I don't even like it when the register at Meijer's (which doesn't use a loyalty card) spits out coupons for competing products based on what I just bought. I pass them to the person behind me. If you think you are being "rewarded" for loyalty or for purchsing brand x, you need to go back to home economics class or psych class and read up on behavior modification. All that nonsense about it being just like the personal service you used to get 40 years ago at the corner grocery is just that--nonsense. Loyalty plans are a huge industry with its own press releases, and that's most of the sources you'll find on the internet, or in newspapers, which are quite dependent on the advertising revenue from the stores using the loyalty plans. I am not in any way saying this is a bad business--but it is a business and their bottom line, not your feeling warm and fuzzy, is what matters.

Obviously, my friend who will travel around to various stores to take advantage of the coupons sent to her based her buying habits or specials and loss leaders, didn't see it my way. We just changed the subject. Here's a recent item from another blog.

"Today’s loyalty card programs are not designed to reward the faithful — they are designed to help retailers gather incredible amounts of data about their customers. They use the data for supply chain management, for marketing and to figure out ways to change customer behavior. A loyalty card program is expensive to run. It requires a lot of storage for all that data and sophisticated data mining tools to pour through the raw data and turn it into useful information." IT Knowledge

It must be terribly hard for a new product to make its way onto the shelves, even if it is fabulous. For now, I'll continue to shop at stores that don't want to follow me home and peek in my pantry.