Hacker News Reader

In grad school, there was one office door that had an envelope taped to it marked "Safeway shuffle" or something like that, with an explanation to take a card and leave a card. It had a similar effect.

I have had at least three Safeway cards issued to me without having filed any paperwork. Each time the card was issued the clerk asked whether I already had a card. I responded in the negative. The clerk pulled a card out from under the till or a drawer, scanned the card to apply a discount, and then handed me the card to keep.

In fact, you can often keep the activated card (at all kinds of stores) even if they do ask you to fill in some papers. Just ask to take the forms home to fill them in and return later and take the card, too.

They can still tie the card to you if you ever use a credit card with it.

Or you enter a competition [with card number] or use a coupon they posted out to you.

Or pay by check.

I've long since avoided Safeway (going on two decades), but back when I both visited the store and had a card, but under a different name (usually some variant of "Fred Flintstone" or "Mickey Mouse"), I found that my actual name eventually ended up on the receipt if I every paid by check.

Lesson: don't pay by check.

Lesson: don't patronize stores with shopper surveillance cards.

Most recent notable experience: a few visits to Border's Books, in which the store's "loyalty card" was pushed ever more vigorously. I responded "no, the NSA's already listening to my phone calls and reading my emails, no need for them to get my reading list as well" (this was years before Snowden, though after the AT&T listening room was revealed). The cashier was impressed by my integrity, and commented as much, as I paid cash for my purchase.

The last time I was asked if I had their card was during the final week of the store's liquidation sale. And I was thinking 1) why even bother and 2) where will that data go after the company shuts down (it turns out it was bought by Barnes & Nobel, which may itself go the way of Borders before too long).

So. Yeah. I'll pass.

This is true, and your buying instruments (unless you always pay cash) or even your time of purchase/store choice will correlate out those three cards as all "you". We are very much creatures of habit and this is what Safeway and people like Target rely upon.

Now without the baby sitting co-op to randomize data I've offered my card to people ahead of me in line who don't have one, but again the gas rewards are changing that equation as well.

Many stores let you enter your phone number on a keypad if you've forgotten your loyalty card at home. If you don't feel like signing up for a store's card to get a discount, just try entering 867-5309 (from the Jenny song) in your local area code. 99% of the time it works!

For anyone who asked my phone number i always used 555-1212 which was the 'universal' number for directory assistance for a long time. If people questioned it I said, call that number, ask for me, they will tell you the number to call :-)

These days Safeway has "fixed" that practice by tying gas rewards to a particular card number. That forces people to use the same card if they want to get gas rewards. I don't know but I suspect it was in response to activities like ours which mitigated their efforts to collect data.

As a non-USian who does not know this system, can somebody please explain what "gas rewards" are and why they would prevent the kind of card shuffling explained by ChuckMcM?

Something like $0.10/gal off, and tied between your Safeway loyalty account and credit card you use to buy your gas.

oh, you mean petrol? I thought safeway was in the business of supplying natural gas to homes.

you could still pool all the cards and split the reward between you, couldn't you?

Safeway would be considered a grocery store or supermarket. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grocery_store

In the US, most large grocery store offer a card that you can use which gives you various rewards, and in turn allows them to perform analytics on their customer base.

Historically, these rewards were related to coupons for products in the store. However, this means that there is no benefit to using your particular card instead of someone else's.

More recently, the grocery stores have added other bonuses. The one that I'm most familiar with is for fuel / petrol. They team up with some fuel brand, say exxon, and when you've purchased enough on your loyalty card, you get something like $0.05 of your per gallon fuel costs.

The scheme with the poster above breaks down, because you need the physical loyalty card to use the fuel discount, and it's unlikely that everyone is refueling their car an equal amount each week, and that everyone is purchasing an equivalent amount of product at the store each week.

Depending on your purchases at Safeway (grocery store) a partner gas (petrol) station (Chevron) will give you $0.10 - $0.80 discount per gallon of gas. For that to work you have to present to the gas station the same Safeway "club card" that you used to buy your groceries.

The size of the discount is tied to the amount of purchases made with that card present. So if you make a lot of purchases you get a bigger discount per gallon at the gas station.

If you share the card or exchange it with others, the first one to use the discount gets that savings, the next person does not. The discount resets on use, and it can be re-established by the next set of purchases on the card.

What that does is creates an economic incentive for someone to use the same card (maximize purchases to maximize discount) and not share it (discount is one time only, and to the current holder of the card.)

What are you people so afraid of? It's standard marketing. You go in a database with millions of others and your data is aggregated and analyzed. Nobody is hunting you down based on what products you purchase from the grocery store.

Are you so sure that the data couldn't be useful in the future? Perhaps the grocery and health insurance industries might team up to identify folks with unhealthy diets, or unusually high consumption of prescription or OTC medications.

Hopefully our representatives will pass laws preventing such things. Many systems in the US are flawed, but hopefully we are moving in the right direction and our privacy will be protected by consumer protection agencies. Yes, everyone who signs up for programs such as rewards cards are able to find out the stipulations and use of data, but it's unreasonable to assume that every participant can predict the full scope of their actions.

Same goes for every one of the thousands of products we purchase, isn't it a waste of time, money, and national health to put the responsibility of researching products and services in the hands of individuals? Why are companies allowed to sell me snake-oil, cigarettes, and other harmful products?

Why isn't there a law that prevents marketing data from being tied to personal identifiable information?

http://blog.chron.com/frugalconfessions/2011/09/mined-consum...

and

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

Show that individual data can be and is accessed.

That's a really clever way to randomize the data!