The most benign explanation is that it allows the store to gather
marketing information.


For example, the store knows that more people will buy a particular
brand of orange juice if they put it on sale from a regular price of
$2.99/half gallon down to $2.19/half gallon, but they also have good
reason to want to know details.


Do the people who buy it on sale stock up and then not buy it the
following week? Do the people who buy it on sale normally buy a less
expensive brand and switch when the more expensive stuff goes on sale?
Do the people who never buy orange juice try it when the price goes down?


The store can gather all sorts of useful information if they can track a
particular customer's buying habits. They can discover if the person
who avoids orange juice with sugar added also avoids all products with
added sugar or just orange juice. Does that customer ever buy candy, or
does the customer also buy diet soda? It tells how well advertising is
working in specific ways. Do customers who buy premium ice cream read
the ads in the local paper, or do they respond to a promotion at the
local school?


The information is incredibly useful in setting prices. This way they
can discover just how much the customer will pay for orange juice before
switching to apple or grape or no juice at all. It helps them discover
how high the prices can go before the customer will buy groceries elsewhere.


The trouble was that the consumers didn't see the information gathering
as benign. A certain number signed up like proverbially sheep, but a
great many (and I'm unprepared to give numbers or percentages or
anything like that) didn't want the cards. They wanted to buy products
without giving up their privacy, and they wanted to buy products on sale
like they used to. They figured a cash transaction shouldn't have the
spectre of Big Brother behind it. The only way the stores were going to
get the information was to buy it. The sale items that you could get
only with the card became better and better sales. There were fewer
sales that you didn't need a card for. The signage got worse. It was
harder to know what you needed a card for and what you didn't. The
stores had to make getting that card seem like an advantage for the
consumer.


Some consumers wanted the good prices without giving up their privacy
enough to give false names and addresses, but that screwed up the data
gathering system. The store wants to know how far its customers travel
to get to the supermarket. If the customers will drive 5 miles, they
don't need a store in every town. The store wants to know what economic
bracket the customers are in, how much they make, what kind of car they
drive. All this matters in using the information effectively. So the
stores started asking for photo I.D. to get the cards.


When the cards started coming in where I live in New England, I talked
about them with my uncle on the West coast. They became popular at
roughly the same time here and there. I don't think they started at one
part of the country or another.


Where I live, there is one remaining supermarket that doesn't use the
cards. I drive out of my way to shop there and like the store as much
as I like any supermarket. All told, it is pretty good. It isn't like
going into a fish market where they filet the fish to my order right
there or a private butcher or specialty cheese store, but the store is
clean; the staff is helpful; there's a fair variety to the produce, and
the prices are good.


At one point I got a clip board and went to all 3 local supermarkets on
the same day, the 2 with cards and the one without. I wrote down the
prices of items I might buy on a typical shopping trip. Boy was that an
eye opener! I saw for the first time how astoundingly difficult
gathering and putting together data is. I understood why the stores
would want those cards so badly.


It is easy to say "I'm out of orange juice. I like the kind with no
pulp, not from concentrate, in the half gallon container, from Florida,
and I don't care what the brand name is; I only want the least expensive
I can get." But most decisions have far more variables than that. On
every shopping trip, I buy some sort of leafy green vegetable, usually
one from the cabbage family. I like broccoli more than cabbage, but I
buy cabbage for variety too. I like kale, but it is usually more
expensive than broccoli. This is not a binary decision. I take into
account preference, what I haven't had recently, how good the produce
looks on a given day (cabbage tends to be uniformly good while broccoli
can vary and be about to go to seed), how good the alternate item looks
in comparison, comparitive price within the one item (is broccoli more
expensive this week than last) and comparitive price between similar
items (is broccoli less expensive than kale).


When I'm making the decision, it all makes sense to me. I expect
someone following me around would think I was a lunatic. (Don't you
dare put sugar in my orange juice, but I'll happily buy candy and 5
pounds of sugar to bake with. I also buy premium ice cream and skim milk.)


The one remaining supermarket that doesn't use cards in my area also has
the best all over prices. I realized when I went around that day
comparing prices that the card stores had great prices on items I don't
buy that often. The best example was soda. I do drink soda but only in
the summer when I get a real hankering for it. I buy fruits and
vegetables all the time. The card store had soda deeply discounted if I
had a card. The fruits and vegetables were a few cents more on every
item. So was bags of flour, bags of sugar, lower end meats. If I
bought at the non-card store, and cooked mostly from scratch as I mostly
do, I came out better at the store that doesn't use cards. I drive a
tiny car so I figure it evens out with the extra driving I do to get to
the store I like.


If you're in an area where there's not much choice in supermarkets and
they all use cards, your best bet is to find friends who feel as you do
and switch cards with them every time you see them. Go to work, switch
cards. Go to church or PTA meetings or your bowling game, and switch
cards with anyone willing to switch with you. If you can get 10, 20 or
30 people switching regularly, the data will make no sense to the data
collectors. Or use a different phone number every time you shop. Ask
the person in front of you in line if you can buy your groceries on
their card. As a last resort, separate your groceries into those you
need a card to buy on sale and those you don't. Go through the line
once without using the card for the groceries it doesn't matter on and a
second time using it for the sale items.


--Lia