Where I live, we don’t yet have those cards. I despise the idea of them and hate getting caught out by them (I’m looking at you Tesco and Lidl).
Normal price for something - 0.49 (in stores without these cards) But in their store it’s only that price with their ‘club card’ or ‘plus membership’.
Otherwise it’s 1.59
There are loads of other items with high markups.
BUT - the marked price is the normal store price to the inexperienced shopper of these data collecting stores, with the blind spot being the need to have a store card to get the ‘discount’. My full shop was an extra 103.46 altogether between the two stores (51.22 in one 52.24 in the other) rushing to get christmas dinner and dining and extras. Should be banned. /rant
The government doing a sick job of protecting consumers. /s
I’m really annoyed by this as well, but why do you jump from that to concluding that the government should ban it? I don’t see any reason why the stores should not in principle be allowed to do it.
It’s tantamount to being required to provide personal details in order to purchase something.
On principle, I shouldn’t be required to provide my personal details to purchase.
“But that’s your choice”
Not really… selling me an item at half price in exchange for my details is really just extortion. “We’ll charge you double if you don’t provide us your contact number”
Historically, the whole point to the loyalty card coupons was because then they could track your purchases and sell that data on you.
It used to be incredibly valuable, and it techncially still is. But your big box retail stores are going to insane lengths, including tracking you from the moment you pull into their parking lot (including knowing what kind of car you drive,) and how many times you circle, lets say, the lego aisle, or the cookies. They know how long you spend looking at stuff and are selling all of that. (as well as using for marketing to sell you more shit you don’t need.)
I don’t for a moment doubt that this is true.
The thing that amazes me is… how terribly poorly targeted ads are?
As in, I purchased a washing machine last week, so as an avid purchaser of washing machines I certainly need to see ads for washing machines?
This always irks me, like if you’re going to harvest my data, could you at least use some of your immense repository of data insights to improve your product? No? You’re just going to enclose the data commons in your ridiculous quest to make the line go up, without giving any value back to the people who facilitated your growth? Yeah, I thought that’d be the case. Disappointed, but not surprised that this is the case.
The context in which this most often annoys me is that nearly every Tuesday, I go to a philosophy discussion group at a nearby pub. I usually get the route up on Google maps through Android Auto because the optimal route depends a lot on traffic, and each time, I have to manually type in the name of the pub.
It especially annoys me when sometimes, on a day that isn’t Tuesday, the pub will be listed near the top of the suggested destinations when I first launch Google maps. I literally never go to that pub for any reason other than the philosophy group.
It’s such a trivial thing to be annoyed by, but equally, it appears to me that actually giving useful suggestions in straightforward cases such as this is equally trivial. It reveals that they truly don’t give a fuck about improving products (and indeed, when it comes to Google’s offerings, so much of it has gotten worse. Google assistant and its voice recognition used to be way more reliable and powerful in the past. I first started using Android 10 years ago and I had so much fun tinkering with automation on my Nexus 6; there are things that I could do before that I no longer can, and it annoys me to no end)
I guess it boils down to marketing etc. So. Maybe the government shouldn’t outright ban it, but it should definitely have stricter rules. The ‘discount’ price shouldn’t be allowed to be advertised as though it is the main price - with the original price being smaller and easier to go unnoticed. But also the reason why the cards exist should be more transparent. Data collecting. The people that do not have the cards are being charged more. But the people that do have them are being monitored more easily.
Now, I’m not one of those “muh free market” morons, but I also think that not every potentially-abusable business practice immediately deserves government regulation against it. By and large it seems that most customers really don’t care that much about this (myself included). The ability for customers to choose where they shop has regulatory power which I think a lot of people fail to recognise. If a behaviour is really repulsive, then customers will just not shop there, which provides a strong negative incentive against the behaviour in question, without any state intervention or enforcement resources required.
An example of this working in practice is the practice of restaurants attempting to introduce tipping in Australia (where it is not customary to tip). Whenever a restaurant frequented by locals tries to force them to tip or makes it awkward to not tip, there is an immediate and strong negative reaction to it from the customers which usually causes the restaurant to give up on the idea.