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Supermarket rewards card- yes or no?
I have held out for years from getting a loyalty/membership card from supermarkets as I hate the tracking that they do. But here in the UK so many prices are now locked behind it in most supermarkets, it feels like I’m just giving them so much extra money it’s getting ridiculous. I end up spending more money to shop where they don’t do this, but most of the major players are now adding these member only prices it’s hard to keep the status quo.
For other privacy minded people, how do you manage this?
I am a big believer in the vegan diet. Less cruelty in the food system, less environmental pollution, and better for human health.
I want some analyst looking at my purchasing record and noticing "Hey! This guy isn't buying animal products or processed food. He isn't buying things we price gouged. Other people aren't either. Let's think about adjusting things.".
Why do they need to track individuals for that insight? They obviously know what they are selling when they are restocking. If their vegan section is always sold out, they can restock more frequently to sell more. Why do they care how much of their vegan stuff is bought by single millenial pregnant donkeys? Profit maximization. By playing their game, you are effectively saying: Milk me for as much money as you can! Manipulate my thoughts as you please to make the rich richer! I am yours and I'm loving it!
I gladly pay what they ask, but I'm not investing in the ad industry that is spending countless billions every year into manipulating me to buy crap I don't need. Fuck that all the way to hell and back. You can put your stupid reward card into my cold dead hand.
I can't follow this logic... surely this is having the opposite effect of what you want, by indicating that they should increase pricing on vegan food, thus making non-vegan options more appealing?
I think it's less about pricing, more about changing inventory. If people buy more vegan food, they'll stock more vegan food and hopefully remove non-vegan food to make room for the new options.
That makes sense, and I suppose the last few years has shown that supermarkets don't really care about finding an excuse to raise prices...
It’s very upsetting to me that grocery stores have started forcing everyone to join their rewards programs. The “deals” you get by becoming a member aren’t even deals. Grocery stores have increased their prices for non-rewards members and allow you to purchase groceries for a normal price if you swipe your rewards card.
I don’t know what the equivalent in the UK would be (maybe Aldi), but in the US, Trader Joe’s is affordable and doesn’t have a rewards program. The only downside is that it has smaller portions that make it harder for families to do their shopping there.
If you are already an Amazon member, Whole Foods uses your Amazon account as the rewards account. If you shopped there, you at least wouldn’t have to give away personal data to additional companies.
I agree with you on how many stores have simply started punished customers that don't have their loyalty cards, but I'd argue that Trader Joes is not particularly affordable. Aldi is significantly cheaper than Trader Joes, and even the regular grocery stores are cheaper (without the loyalty cards) than Trader Joes. I honestly can't understand why they are so busy/popular. Maybe they have good sales that people are after?
I like Trader Joe’s because of the lack of options. If you go to a traditional grocery store, you have to compare a bunch of equivalent items and make a decision about quality vs price. In Trader Joe’s, you walk in and grab what you need without having to put extra thought into it.
Ah you said it first. Aldi has the "only one option" thing going for it as well and it's cheap in a way TJs isn't IME
I'd use Aldi as a better comparison in the US, unless Trader Joe's has more locations in other parts of the country. I have 3 Aldi (and Krogers and other stores) and the nearest TJ is hours away. I know Aldi depends too but it's much more of a traditional albeit discount grocery store
At least in California, Trader Joe’s is plentiful and Aldi is harder to find.
Ah gotcha, it would still not be an affordable regular trip for me, barring some major price changes from the last time I shopped there. Only place I can find meringues (the little bite sized ones) regularly anymore though
That really depends on where in California you reside. In my area there are more Aldi stores than Trader Joe's. Not by a huge amount, but it is noticeable.
Yes, Aldi/Lidl in the UK have held out, as has Waitrose. Waitrose is too expensive, and Aldi/Lidl are too far away for me, and I find their food goes off quite quickly.
In a way, I would rather give data to a different company to avoid over centralisation of all my information, especially when it’s different domains of information.
Lidl already has a reward scheme in the UK as well, they just haven't locked any pricing behind it yet.
Ah my bad
I don't know how they do it in the UK, but in the US rewards accounts are tracked by phone number. <local area code>-867-5309 has never failed me.
My whole family still uses my moms old house phone. No idea who owns it now if anyone but we’ve been using it for groceries for like 30 years and we don’t plan on stopping
This is what I was going to say. You don't get the rewards, but you still get (most) discounts. I say "most" because at least my local grocery store also does "digital coupons" that you attach to your account and redeem at checkout.
There's also always the option of filling out the form with bogus information.
I did this with a UK Nectar reward card account and now my account with them is effectively bricked because it won't let me in without sending a verification text to a number I gave them which isn't a number (their input validation was non-existent, I literally just mashed the keyboard for a few seconds). I can't register another card/create a new account using the same physical address, which is odd because more than one person could live there or I could have moved.
Admittedly I have put slightly more effort into writing this comment than I have into fixing a 'problem' which I do not care about, so it's probably solvable. My reward card still gets me discounts in store, I don't get the digital coupons but given in the past they were always utterly useless I don't think I'm missing much. "Oh, this guy has never bought peanut butter, maybe 50p off a jar will tempt him?" No you stupid fucks I just don't like the stuff. "Hmm, he's never bought pet food so maybe 15% off pet insurance is a great personal offer"
Hmm...
Yeah phone numbers are a problem. I would love a service which allowed masked phone numbers like they do for email (e.g. iCloud or fastmail).
Oh, this exists! Firefox Relay lets you have one alternative phone number, and there is another service I can't remember the name of at the moment that lets you have up to... Something like 9? They're all limited in various ways — phone numbers can't be handed out arbitrarily, the way that email addresses are, because there are far fewer of them available, and they can't receive automated texts from short numbers. Still nice to have, though!
In my very anecdotal experience, shopping at stores that have loyalty programs generally results in paying more for groceries than stores that don't have those kinds of schemes. The place I shop at the most is a locally owned grocer, and their produce is usually something like 1/2 to 1/4 the price of the major grocery stores. While not quite as dramatic, Aldi and Winco offer very competitive prices generally, and Smart & Final stores are usually a bit of a mixed bag but generally have slightly lower prices for most things. None of them have loyalty programs.
I have to acknowledge, though, that this because I have won the geography lottery. I'm in California, where most of the fresh food is grown, so my primary source of food (produce) is cheap and easy to get. I'm also in a suburban environment, so there is heavy competition for grocery stores. I'm also in an area that has strong Asian demographics, so there's an entire category of stores that most people don't have access to: large Asian markets, where prices on produce and imported delicacies are pretty low in general even when they do have loyalty programs.
just don't give them real information. 5551234 in your area code is almost always someone if you only want the deals and not the points.
For me, I just use 555 with the last four digits of my real number for all of these cards. I also use a fake name for absolutely everything like this. Its a decent compromise.
I use them, it saves me money and I'm good at coupon/app deals and combining them. Yes that's all advertiser data or whatever but frankly I need to take 50 bucks off my bill now, not complain that it should be $50 cheaper for everyone and pay more. ┐( ˘_˘)┌
In the case of Nectar, you can just pick up a card in the shop and start using it. You don't need to give them any of your information.
I regularly do this when I've forgotten mine. I must have five or six of them at this point, and that's only the ones I haven't lost.
It does mean you don't get the cashback part of the 'deal' but given that's something like 0.25p per pound spent I'm not losing any sleep over it. Especially because I'm so bad at using the Self-scan machines they never trained me on how to use. Stuff is always getting scanned badly. I'm so careless oh no.
Interesting, I didn’t know that you didn’t need to give any details for nectar. Thanks for that, very helpful.
It's slightly annoying, but I haven't heard of any harm coming from getting a grocery loyalty card. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing you need to think twice about.
Not OP but I don't want any person or organization profiling my individual shopping cooking and eating habits. It's intrusive.
I acknowledge your point, but it’s more of the principle, and what could be theoretically deduced by your purchase history (especially for food which is inherently linked to biology and health).
Also, all of these are ultimately done to try and increase your spending, and done for the companies benefit, not yours. It also opens the way for more personalised pricing in the future, which is where the consumer is really on the back foot.
Yes, grocery stores try to sell food any way they can. For example, by putting candy next to the register.
However, the main effect of loyalty cards is that shoppers declare whether they care about saving money or not. The people who choose to play the game get lower prices, and the people who decide not to, for whatever reason, pay higher prices. Subtle behavioral tricks would need to be implausibly effective to cost you more than you save by playing the game.
I sometimes decide that playing these games is not worthwhile, but there's a cost to opting out. It's up to you to decide how much convenience or doing things out of principle is worth to you.
All this is assuming you shop in the same store. Going elsewhere is always an option.
Stores here will all scan a generic store card if you ask them to, so you can get the deal price without needing a card of your own. Is that not typical?
Another option is Jenny. 867-5309 in the local area code works for just about any loyalty program.
That's genius! For younger folks, there was an old song where the name and phone numbers are in the lyrics. The number only had 7 digits because area codes weren't a thing yet. Or was it long distance calling not yet a thing hence no need for area codes?
Someone got the reference! The song is apparently called 867-5309/Jenny. I guess it’s a fitting name.
Apparently area codes came about in 1947, but I think phones defaulted to the local code for a long time. I remember it switching to requiring an area code sometime in my lifetime. Maybe it was when we switched from pots (plain old telephone service) to VoIP (voice over ip/internet).
The switch seems to happen when you have enough area codes in a certain area. Mine only switched in the past five-ish years iirc, most of us just dialed them because we're used to cellphones and the ease of being out of area but I didn't technically need to dial them on my VOIP work phone five years ago.
I bet people don't know about it. While I'm almost always a member of a grocery loyalty program, I have seen other people do it. Not often, but enough. Typically it's, "Oh I forgot my card and I don't remember what phone number it's under!" and then the cashier pulls out a generic loyalty card and scans it cuz it's quicker.
My family shares one card between probably 3 different nuclear families of multiple sizes or so.
Myself, I don't have or use a "membership" at all/anywhere where I live. But on the other hand 99% of the time I don't even look at the prices when shopping.
Well, I don't use any loyalty/membership cards.
I just think about it like I do with any "free" service: if you don't pay for it, you are the product.
So either you pay 20coins more for the eggs or you pay the equivalent of 20coins (or more) by the data they get from you.
I'd rather pay in coins.
If a card is tied to my name/phone number, I wouldn't get it. If it's not related to my identity in any way and just allows the company to track the history of my purchases with my account id, I'd get it if the benefits are good
So what it's worth I've had a Tesco Clubcard since long before they started introducing all the insane Clubcard only pricing, back when the earn rates for things like buying petrol were actually good.
Over that time I have managed to do quite well with actually getting something back out of the "points". During their attempt at competing with the like of Argos, I was able to convert the vouchers at some silly rate like 3/4x their "worth" and used that to buy a PS4 for example.
These days though, biggest personal benefit is that you need one for access "scan as you shop". At my local store, the queue to go through at the regular checkouts can still get pretty silly backing into the aisles, but the self scan ones are always outside of the Christmas rush also quiet, so I can go pay and leave with little fuss / waiting around. The exclusion to that being the occasional bag checks, where I need to hang around while a member of staff randomly scans a few things to ensure everything is above board.