Re: Loyalty card

Posted by Barney on January 30, 2002 at

In Reply to: 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..."

Every since an incident in the UK - reported about 3 years ago - when a major supermarket chain revealed (as they must if requested by the Revenue Service) the spending habits of it's loyalty card holders I have torn up all my loyalty cards and only spend cash in supermarkets. The Revenue Service accused a lady, who did the shopping for a number of people in an old folks home, of concealing her income. They based this conclusion on the level of her spending in the supermarket, which, they calculated, would require an income many times greater than this ladies declared income. So I say, "to hell with all this control, we have no need of it and our freedom is worth more than the few pennies saved".