Loyalty card

Posted by ESC on January 30, 2002

Loyalty card, also called a savings card. The card allows businesses to track a customer's purchases. Shoppers exchange privacy for cents-off discounts.

Jan. 31, 2002
Grocery savings cards could get much nosier
By Jennifer Hoyt
Associated Press
"You swipe your savings card against a screen mounted on a supermarket shopping cart. As you move about the store, the screen flashes ads for products you usually buy, notes that you haven't bought toothpaste in six months and provides recipes and health information.

All the while, your every move -- including which aisles you go down and how long you spend in each department -- is tracked for marketing purposes via the savings card, also known as a loyalty card.

Such technology is in the works, and privacy advocates -- already concerned about the proliferation of cards that monitor customers' purchases -- are outraged.

Carl Messineo, co-founder of Partnership for Civil Justice, called the technology ''visual pollution'' that ''if forced upon me, I probably would sooner starve.''

Klever Marketing of Salt Lake City, plans to provide the screens to supermarkets at no charge as early as this summer..."

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