I wish loyalty programs would be considered unfair competition. They are a drain on society.
Kroger for example. Jacks prices wayyy up without 'Plus.'
Being clever, I decided to 'sign up' manually but never filled out the form or sent it in. Still gave me discounts.
Tell others about my newfound secret, and they laugh and tell me they're doing the same tracking and more via my credit card. Doh.
What was the point of the loyalty card then?
Do you think it's still that way today? I really have no idea. I worked grocery 20 years ago and remember being amazed how many people pay cash. I can't remember the last time I've seen someone pay with a check at the grocery. I see cash here and there, but mostly credit or tap. But I have no idea what the breakdown would be.
I think the loyalty programs are mainly about price segmentation and co-marketing now.
the main point of loyalty cards was (and still is) data collection (which you've managed to work around) but they are also being used to help condition the public into accepting the idea that some people get (or even "deserve" to get) different prices than other people for the exact same items because of who or what they are.
For example:
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/supermarkets-introduce-perso...
https://risnews.com/safeway-offers-personalized-pricing-prog...
Businesses always try to frame this as allowing them to offer "deals" to you, but honestly what they want is to raise prices just for you. They stand to make a killing on personalized dynamic pricing. It could massively inflate their profits (entirely at your expense) but what has been standing in their way so far is that consumers find personalized pricing to be invasive, unfair, and discriminatory. Businesses are working very hard to get the public to accept personalized pricing though and loyalty cards/programs are seen as a way to help that.
Unless you like being ripped off and being taken advantage of, try to resist and push back against personalized pricing when you see it.
See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3
Consider airline miles. Each time I purchase a ticket, instead of choosing the best deal (fair competition), I am incentivized to choose an airline I have chosen in the past so as not to fragment my points across several accounts. And of course, these "rewards" are all a price passed on to the consumer.
It goes:
Number of stops -> arrival/departure time -> layover time -> cost.
I also feel like I only ever have 1 nonstop flight option, maybe 2. Maybe the biggest airports have sufficiently redundant flights, but even then, surely most people know points are worth 1% at most, and in my experience, flight prices differ by hundreds.
I would be confused if I learned people were buying flights based on points/miles. I assume the miles/points are mainly utilized by very frequent travelers, or people using credit card rewards.
They are & so is the parent of your post. In the US, it's common for supermarket cashiers to lookup loyalty cards by the customer's phone number. The comment you replied to is saying that the phone number <area-code>-867-5309 is almost always tied to an existing loyalty card. Lots of people just give that phone number if they want the discounts without signing up.
You can also get a copy of a barcode by various nefarious means, if needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WTdTwcmxyo
In the overwhelming majority of US television and movies, onscreen phone numbers are of the form 555-xxxx to prevent clashes with those telecoms actually hand out. However, numbers of the form 867-xxxx are perfectly valid; and when Brown University made the mistake of handing out 867-5309 to an unfortunate dorm room around 1999 or so, those people were deluged with phone calls asking for Jenny.
Mr Jones also included the area code, didn’t repeat the number in the chorus, and didn’t put it in the song title; and “Back Then” also wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous.
Allowing people who don't care about their privacy to sell it seems like a fair transaction. Sabotaging capitalism & markets by not allowing consumers and producers to engage in barter seems inadvisable.
I personally care about my privacy, so I choose not to use overbearing services. I don't think that I should rob others of the ability to trade their privacy for better deals.
Really, the ‘discount’ price is the original price.
It’s a shell game.
In fact, when almost everyone pays the ‘stalking’ price, even when they obviously don’t want to be stalked and go out of their way to screw with the program and attempt to stop the stalking, your comment seems to completely ignores actual reality, which is heavily influenced by marketing, social pressures, price pressures, etc?
You know, actual market forces in a capitalist environment?
A shell game is one where misdirection is used to point someone towards an option which benefits the person running the game if the other player chooses it, by hiding the actual choice they want through confusion and obfuscation.
Seems like a perfectly appropriate description here?
by allowing the practice, the people that are fine with being tracked are imposing a tax on everyone else.
I see it as a dodge around unit pricing. Every price has the price per item and the price per 100ml/100g/whatever is appropriate. It's the law that applies to all shops that aren't small.
Easy to compare, until you come to the discounted prices which don't have unit prices printed. They can be multi buys, Clubcard offers, bundles, or whatever.
This seems intuitively free and fair, but the same sentiment is the centrepiece of John Stuart Mill's (problematic but fascinating) examination of Harm Principle and limits of personal liberty.
Namely; not being able to sell yourself into slavery.
Ordinary people (in the technological age) are not really capable of understanding or valuing their privacy and weighting the consequences of trading it. For the same reason we don't allow children to enter contracts I think it could fairly be said the average adult doesn't have capacity to "trade their privacy".
Why should the fact that they haven't thought things through take away natural rights?