Why do I need a club card to qualify for sale prices at the grocery store?
All of this has been said already in the thread, but I wanted to quickly point out that there are many different uses for club cards, with various degrees of nefariousness attached to them: (as a slight qualifier of background, I once took a graduate computer science class in data mining, which focused heavily on data collected from grocery store type places) 1) Help stores figure out what is selling and when. The data is aggregated together, to obtain results like “people sure do buy a lot of milk between the hours of 5 and 7 pm, when they head home from work”. No personal information is recorded. Club cards are not required for this scenario, since everyone just scans barcodes anyway. This data is used to time promotions, store displays, and what have you. 2) Help stores figure out what groups of products are selling together. The data is primarily used to position things close together, beyond where it makes obvious sense. If the store had reliable data saying that 1999 Australian M
I used to use the card at FJ when they had one. They had no personal information on the card other than a town (that was preprinted on the application when they opened the new store in town). The only information that my card gave them was that I read their sales flyer, and bought the things that were on sale, only rarely buying things that weren’t on sale. A couple of years ago, they dropped their bonus club card, and there’s only one chain that has a discount card. I’ve shopped at a grocery chain in a different part of the state, and they’ve got cards at the register. If you don’t have a card, the cashier will scan the register card. It’s a small town, with a reasonable tourist level in the summer, and I think they use it to track what gets bought with what. I don’t know if their corporate office thinks it’s acceptable, but it’s OK with the regional manager. There’s a new wrinkle in the club cards though. The community rewards card. The shopper doesn’t get a discount, but a designate
