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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

In some ways we already are. For instance if I use my supermarket loyalty card, they let me save around 1-2% on my purchase in exchange for the better tracking they get.

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How much of this discount is for tracking, and how much is pure price discrimination?

The barrier of carrying a card allows the supermarket to give a discount to customers who are motivated by that, without needing to give the same discount to everyone.

The value of the tracking is probably irrelevant to how they set the price: it is not that loyalty card discounts have increased since tracking has become more valuable.

Yes, the loyalty card should be named "loyalty and tracking card", and we don't know how the discount is divided over both.

I've never actually used a supermarket loyalty card connected to my real persona. Either the information has all been fake, or I've used somebody else's.

At the end of the day, I use the same credit card every time I shop, so I'm sure that they can harvest all their data from that. But I feel like it's a bit of a "fuck you" to the system that my loyalty card says I'm a 40 year old woman.

They don't really care though. The point of a loyalty card is to connect all of your purchases to one person or household. Knowing the age and gender of that person is interesting, but not really necessary.

These supermarkets want to know if there is a correlation between you buying X frequently, and Y occasionally. They want to know if your profile is that of a bargain hunter or a premium gourmet hobby chef. Knowing all that, they can offer you tailored deals designed to nudge your spending behaviour one way or another, and they can determine if a specific store location should focus more on certain groups of customers.

I've seen the discount being more like 25%. Hell, pretty much any product at Safeway has a "Safeway price" that practically forces you to use the discount card.

That's when they raise the list price to $4.29 for a box of Triscuits rather than the $2.99 they are most of the rest of the time.

There's no way one person's data is worth a 25% discount surely. That strategy must be something like, have the sales we were going to have anyway (to attract customers to the store), but make the card required to get them.

At the supermarket I'm thinking of, with the 1-2% discount, there'll still be normal sale items that don't require the card, and then extra discounts that only the card gives you. Actually I just remembered the card earns you reward points as well (albeit slowly), so the total amount you "save" is indeed a little more.

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