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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

Another tip: (area code) 867-5309 works for Safeway club card discounts in most area codes while piping tracking of your purchases to essentially null.

Yes, Jenny’s number.

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At risk of ya'll taking "my" safeway gas rewards, this is almost always good for whatever the maximum discount off per gallon is at any safeway that also has a gas station.

Its amazing to me the degree to which people will go to save 3% or less on gas once a month. If you fill up 4 times a month you're saving about $4, and all it costs is a profile of everything you buy attached to your phone number.

Given that they're probably already tracking everything via my credit card number (whether I sign up for anything or not), I don't feel like much privacy is being given up.

Though as a rule I don't bother with most of these programs, mainly due to the inconvenience factor.

I've lost hope of maintaining my privacy through any actions I can take individually. A legislative solution is required.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're using a credit card the bank is only getting a receipt that shows the sum total of the transaction and not an itemized receipt. The club cards are consuming and tracking the data of the entire transaction.

The club card acts as unique id to track you. The credit swiped at the machine has a unique id that they can use to track you.

The club card works across multiple credit cards and cash. That’s the main difference. And you might possibly track 2 people who control the household (wife gets one, husband gets one)

Using Apple Pay would circumvent the CC tracking because it only transmits a one-use number.

I've been wondering about returns lately using Google Pay consistently. It seems with returns they often ask 'do you have the card used for the purchase?', but with one-time numbers I don't know if the card will be recognized. My last several purchases I don't recognize the last 4 at all, and wouldn't be able to exclaim, 'yes, that's my card'

While returns are made more complicated by Google and Apple Pay, the card numbers aren’t single-use (which I’m not sure if you mean to imply is the case with google pay today). On both iOS and Android you can view the last few digits of the Device/Virtual Account Number.

I don’t have an Android device to test these instructions on but they seem plausible and corroborated: https://supportcentre.natwestinternational.com/Searchable/91...

When I made a return for an Apple Pay purchase at Target, they saw that the transaction was marked “Tapped” as card type and took my word for which card was correct. Who knows how long that’ll last. Where I really expect to run into problems down the line is when I try to take advantage of the insurance benefits offered by cards and can’t produce an invoice/receipt with the expected card number on it.

Unfortunately (from some perspectives), this isn’t true. Each instance of a card in Apple Pay has a long term Device Account Number (DAN) that functions the same as a physical card’s number (though there is no link between the DAN and actual card number from the merchant’s perspective). The same DAN is used across every transaction. The only way to get a new one (which is pretty easy, relatively speaking) is to unload the card from Apple Pay then re-enroll.

Was not aware, thanks for the clarification.

The receipt has the last four digits on the card. Localizing that specific card number to the store and you are going to get pretty complete profiles on people. There will obviously be some duplicates but some smart algorithms could match up the common purchases. If I always buy the same boxed tea and the same deli meat, patterns can arise. The guy who buys a 1/2lb of swiss and 1/2lb of roast beef every week is probably a different person than the one that buys 1lb of cheddar and 1lb of turkey each week. Associate my other purchases with my deli meat choices and they can track when I came in for some special dinner ingredients I've never bought and a box of my usual tea bags. Even purchases that look unremarkable at first glance, like bread, eggs, and milk, have trends (bread brand, egg size/brand, 1%/2%/whole/skim/brand of milk). Having the last four digits makes it a lot easier to track customers but even without that, there are probably unique customer trends you can pull out of the seemingly anonymous data. At minimum the store could print out some coupons that it thinks you would be interested based on your latest purchase and what other people buy with the things you buy. A mom buying capri-suns and lunch snacks would probably be interested in similar kid lunch items.

The store is able to build customer profiles using credit card numbers. The bank doesn't need to be involved at all.

Yes, it won't be perfect (especially if one uses multiple cards), but many stores are getting extremely sophisticated with their techniques for profiling customers.

The grocery store has access to your credit card number when you swipe it. It can associate that card (or a hash of it) with your itemized receipt.

The discount is markedly more substantial than 3%. If it's a Safeway brand gas station the max discount is a dollar off per gallon. The safeway gas station I used to do this at currently has regular for $2.69 a gallon.

The max discount I've ever seen is $0.20 for Chevron, but tends to be $0.10. Chevron is much less rare than a Safeway-branded gas station.

Currently west coast gasoline is ~$4.00/g, so that's about 2.5-5.0% discount, which is in line with GP said.

I got 30 cents off yesterday at a Pacifica gas station. So far this purchase data hasn't hurt me in any fashion. They're welcome to it.

For that $1 off/gallon gasoline, you need to have spent $1000 on groceries. So if your fillup is 10 gallons and gas costs $3/gallon, you will have spent $1000 to save $10. You aren't likely to spend $1000 between each fillup.

Im not, but thats the glory of using (XXX)867-5309. Tons of people know to use that number when buying groceries, many less so when buying gas.

But if you are using someone else’s phone number then maybe, especially if it’s a widely used generic number like in the grandparent comment.

Some people don’t, in fact, live in the Bay or make telephone number salaries hacking React all day.

Whenever I give that number to the cashier, I half expect them to say "hey, wait...."

I thought that number was drilled into everyone's brain, but I guess you have to be a certain age.

According to my last receipt, my YTD "savings" has been $959.68

So I am not the only Jenny out there!

I've never heard of it. I think the most famous phone number from a song currently is 281-330-8004

Ha, never thought to try that. I've been using my dorm room phone number from freshman year of college for 20 years now.

At the self checkout machines at Giant there is a "Forgot my card" option. It gives you all the discounts without entering anything.

According to google it is a number from an early 80's pop song that at the time "caused a fad of people dialing 867-5309 and asking for "Jenny""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny

Similar trick works at AMC movie theaters with their rewards program. You can use it to get discount tickets on Tuesdays and popcorn discounts.

Similarly for all these other rewards programs you see at restaurants nowadays. I will never understand the idea of using a phone number as authentication without any additional PIN or text message or anything. If I have an acquaintance that I know goes to a lot of movies, and I either know or can find their phone number, I can drain their rewards account. Or you can drain their Safeway rewards account, etc. I wonder how much longer the situation will last?

I think they recently cleared this. I tried 10+ area code variants just this weekend and none worked.

Works at my local Safeway, as of yesterday. There was a period of time over a year ago during which Jenny's number didn't work at a different Safeway but it's been reliable at this one, so far.

I use this one when I'm traveling. It almost always works.

510 recently stopped working :/

Ok now I know to type that in any time getting gas at safeway.

Too bad? I don’t have a car

Just get a Jerry can

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