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Grocery Store Cards
Who’s watching when you go grocery shopping? Most grocery stores nowadays seem to be using some variation of what’s often referred to as the customer loyalty or frequent-shopper cards. Basically, what this means is that stores jack their prices up, and then offer free “membership” cards which if you use will save you money at the register. The potential savings, of course, offers enough incentive for most of us to sign up for the programs without a second thought. In turn, knowing that you’ll “save money” at a particular chain store convinces you to go there over competing retailers.
When I first got to Seattle, I got a card from a nearby grocery chain, QFC. Through an employee foul-up, I managed to get one of these cards without having to fill out any form or providing any kind of identifying details. At first I felt like I was getting away with something - like I’d pulled one over on the system. Then I realized it doesn’t matter. First of all, if “they” want to figure out who I am, they could just correlate my purchases using the discount card to whatever credit card I paid with, and there I am. More importantly though, chances are they don’t care who I am. They just care what I buy, how my purchases are grouped together per trip, what patterns emerge over time, and how these patterns correlate to all the rest of their faceless numbered customers.
In an article on the Houston Chronicle’s website, we hear the following information:
Stores say that although individual records on customers are available, customers need not be worried that someone will be able to see how much junk food they bought last month.
“We have millions of records, and we don’t have the time or resources to pull up accounts,” Crainer said.
In other words, they really don’t give a crap who you are. Who you are doesn’t make them money. What you buy makes them money. In some sense, it would seem then that fears about people’s privacy being intruded on by such data-collection processes are a red herring. Companies don’t have obsessive morbid curiousities into people’s individual lives like we do. They’re just trying to open up a space to project marketing into more effectively. Is there anything wrong with that? What are regular people like you and I supposed to do with all this? How do we stem the tide against information intruding into and leaking out of our lives? And does it even matter when it means we can save 50 cents on ice cream the next time we go shopping?
March 18th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Also check out:
Why getting a shopper card under a fake name is not the answer
I can’t decide if that essay is heavy-handed and hysterical or right on target…
March 18th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
This is wrong on so many levels.
First of all, dump the credit cards. You don’t want them. Use them only for online purchases where they really do need your address. Set a budget for food and take cash to the store. You will spend less that way.
Next, you don’t get card savings on everything, just the stuff they want you to buy. You should only buy what you want to buy, not what they want to sell. Organic and local food is hardly ever on sale anyway. Please tell me you aren’t buying factory-made, chemical and disease laden crap.
I am guessing that you drive to the QFC. Get out of your car and get some exercise. Seattle is one of the best places for walking. Had you been walking to the store, you would have already picked up any number of savings cards lying on the ground. Even when walking, please don’t look down.
Seeing as how you just moved in, you probably need some furniture and stuff. Go dumptser diving. Seattle is full of rich people who throw away very nice stuff. You are even more likely to find savings cards in the trash alleys of nice neighborhoods.
Of course, none of this address the “principle” of the savings cards. Big companies are, by nature, unprincipled. They aren’t every going to give up the cards because you want them too. They will give them up when they are no longer profitable. By buying items you choose and making sure what little data they have is bogus is the best way to accomplish that.
March 18th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
I’m not sure why you felt like you needed to bring in all the advice about me driving to the store or getting more exercise or any of the rest. But I do agree that as long as these programs are profitable, stores will continue to use them. I don’t think trying to fill out “bogus” information will make them unprofitable though - especially since it very well may not matter what your personal details are, as long as they can track clusters of purchases, regardless of purchaser. If you really feel like you want to make these programs unprofitable, you’d need to just stop shopping at these stores altogether.
March 19th, 2006 at 1:14 am
Sorry. I had a typo. It probably would have made more sense to say, “People don’t look down.” If you walk to this store 4-5 times and look down, you will probably find a discount card on the ground. Use that one. But the key is that you have to walk and look down. Few people walk and few of those look down. Every time I walk I find something - usually money, sometimes discount cards, cell phones, etc.
You asked “How do we stem the tide against information intruding into and leaking out of our lives?” By not putting any intrisic value into this information. Refusing to provide information will just cause trouble and get you nowhere. No one cares if the information is correct or not. No one cares about privacy or principles either. Give them what they want, but don’t let them control you.
March 19th, 2006 at 1:47 am
What could someone possibly be buying at a grocery store that is so private? 30 packs of condoms and 8 pineapples? (hahaha)
I think I’m starting to get tired of people worrying about their privacy being “invaded” with everyday stuff. I mean, it’s not like they’re putting little tracking devices or cameras in our food… It’s just a marketing research device, which is necessary to continuing better inventory for the chain of stores. That way the buyers (for the store) know that they need to pay less attention to the olive bar, and better place the canned olives in front of peoples faces. On the other hand, if I heard more stories about “agents” showing up at peoples doors, suspecting that if you made hummos and tabbouleh that you might be a terrorist… then maybe I’d have a different opinion on the matter. But until then, continue to improve my experience at the grocery store, guys!
March 19th, 2006 at 1:55 am
I don’t know how I feel abou that. You’re ignoring that marketing seeks to bring commercialization directly into your brain, which I would say would be indicitive of a “naturalization” process: dollar signs dollar signs dollar signs. I don’t say this from a romantic fear, I say this from a practical gnostic paranoia. Money is fake, but to actually re-route the brain to see things in terms of brands and dollar exchanges only reinforces the false gnosis of money. this only further leads to seeing a constructed world as a naturally occuring one…
Here’s an example. Take a little bit of something to give you some extra neurotransmitters, but not a walls-are-melting dose. This is not necessary but it will help tremendously to have a slightly different perceptual map. Go back and forth between a bar and a party where the drinks are free. Pay attention to the attitudes and the interactions and the territories being defended. You’ll see that the two paradigms: money and gift–lead to very different actions. E.g., the faux-friendly extremely territorial bartender. the lonely women with the desparate vibe. vs. relaxation and patronage. Marketing ignores the gift-destructive economy entirely, and leads to a lot of ugly posturing as well as runaway corporate goverment. I don’t think one is really the shadow of the other, either: whereas the gift largely revolves around disregarding the material, money focuses on concentration of things and hoarding… this is probably not making much sense, but I honestly don’t believe that “opening space to marketing” is fucking worthwhile. For christ’s sake MAKE A GOOD PRODUCT AND BE THE BEST AT WHAT YOU DO. this matters more than marketing ever will. stop filling the world with shit and then trying to make up for it with advertising.
March 19th, 2006 at 4:53 am
[…] discount cards, a sort of minor topic, which yielded a true gem in the comments. Reader JD writes, in response to me: You asked “How do we stem the tide […]
March 19th, 2006 at 8:40 am
Trader Joe’s, a grocery chain many of us ignore at our peril, is potentially an exception that proves Tim’s “rule”.
I was doing some shopping there the other day and the clerk at checkout hemmed and hawed a second before blurting out, “do you feel like giving me your zip code? You don’t have to. It’s no big deal either way”. The way he put it caused me to pause before shrugging and then coming up with one of the many zip codes I’ve lived within in my life. I suppose the day you’re asked just that as you’re painlessly scanned retinally is the day our paranoid assumptions become justified. But until then, there is hardly any more information gleaned from you than had they not asked at all. This may belie the “business model” of a supermarket concept such as Trader Joes of course as well. Something tells me for as unassuming, rustic and simple each Trader Joe’s I’ve ever been in seems, the quality, quantity and the sheer numbers of people on hand to buy their products tends to suggest that their demographic marketing data is mined just enough to ensure the happiest number of well-to-do liberals in a given area. It has occurred to me that you don’t plop down a trader joe’s just anywhere, as doing so would dilute the amount of loyalty from your casually demographically datamined clientele. Trader Joe’s, like Whole Foods etc, is a “privilege” type marketing concept — getting one in your neighborhood is doubtless to make your local news (my experience has found this to be invariable). But it could also just be another approach to doing big business — as in, perhaps not all databasing is evil, but is “learning” rather, to cloak itself from being a database at all.
Nevertheless, I love JD’s advice to never buy what “they” want you to buy. Doing so is indeed a sickness of our human condition. Buy what you need when you need/want it. But isn’t that funny I say. Every time I shop at Trader Joe’s, every purchase comes from the impulse I feel to do it. Most every item is priced below $4 and exudes pure organic gourmet. You can’t not go to Trader Joe’s and leave without something you were not intending to buy. I defy anyone to disprove this observation. In fact, the mailer TJ’s sends out often delineates the number of units of something they were able to secure for sale, for you and how or why they invested in this particular limited quanitiy item. It’s all about making you and your buying power feel special. Once you’re made to feel special, they can get you to buy anything.
Up to now, on the whole, I have never been disappointed with anything I have gotten from Trader Joe’s.
(Full disclosure: I am the CEO/president of Trader Joe’s Inc.)
March 19th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
[…] er riff off the conversation that has sprung up here over the past few days. In my post on grocery store discount cards, JD writes: Next, you don’t get c […]