sneaky, I am
Went grocery shopping today, and ended up stuck in line behind someone who did not have a loyalty card with her. [For those who don't know: loyalty cards are things stores give you, then bribe you with 'discounts' on products that are marked up to cover the cost of the loyalty card program.] At this particular store, the loyalty card gives the
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With all the cards every store has, one almost needs a separate wallet (or keychain) to carry them all!
I noticed that very few major stores don't have one anymore - one notable exception (in the Las Vegas area, at least) is Food4Less (a Kroger-owned chain).
It's been mentioned before that the legtimacy of these programs for discount purposes is questionable - much like you say. I think they've always done that mark-up/on-sale shell game, though - they'll put one item on sale, and jack up the price on two or three others.. or they'll put the item on sale for a week or two, then double the price over the pre-sale tag after the sale is over.
That's why, IMO, it pays to shop at multiple stores.. get as many deals as possible.
The other possibility with the "loyalty cards" is data-tracking - when a customer uses the card to buy stuff, a computer can track everything that person buys. They had a L&O episode not too long ago, where a stalker figured out what brand of several items a woman was using, by getting a hold of those records...
(And also - while I have no proof or evidence of any kind - it wouldn't surprise me if the "discounts" are paid for by selling the information the cards gather, in one form or another. As the recent AOL Search fiasco showed, it is possible to figure out an identity from a large amount of "anonymous, aggregate" data. Using only a random number and the searches correlated to it, the editors of a major news site managed to figure out who the number belonged to - and came to their house to confront them!
BTW, my advice for preventing this kind of correlation on you is threefold:
1. Don't search for anything too personal - especially proper names of yourself or anyone related to you in any way;
2. Delete your cookies regularly - the random ID planted on your machine in them eases correlation. If you delete it, it "dumbs up" the server.
3. Use an anonymizing service, like Tor. Tor is particularly good - it's free, and not only does it make you appear to come from a different IP address and network [sometimes country!], but it rotates that IP every 10 minutes or so. This prevents correlation by IP - which, particularly on cable/DSL, doesn't change for months or longer.)
If truth is stranger than fiction, then I hate to think what the truth is. =:o\
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