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

  • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    2 days ago

    They do this because it allowed them to track how often you shop and what you normally buy. This helps them to manage their stock, keeping popular items that regular shoppers buy in stock etc.

    The way it normally works though is that the item is $1.99 but if you have their club card or member card the item is $1.50.

    This means you save money in exchange for allowing them to track your shopping habits.

    Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of … We’ll call them questionable reasons why business want to track your shopping habits, and that tracking doesn’t necessarily stop as just tracking what you buy.

    But it was never meant to be item is less expensive but you only get the less expensive price if you have their card. It was supposed to be, we’ll give you a deal on said item if you let us track you in exchange.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      This helps them to manage their stock, keeping popular items that regular shoppers buy in stock etc.

      Nope. Normal stock management works without tracking individual users habits.

      These cards have the benefit of binding customers to your chain (and to sell ads).

    • NateNate60@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      2 days ago

      They can track what people are buying just as well without needing to know who is buying what. If all they cared about was making sure they are stocking items that are popular with customers, they could just monitor how many of the item were scanned at the checkout counters.

      When you give your phone number to the store, it serves three functions:

      1. The rewards scheme encourages loyalty. Once you have spent hundreds at the store, they give you a minor discount on something small, which saves you only a little bit of money. You only need to decide to patronise this store one time over their competitors for this bribe to be worth it.
      2. By learning your shopping habits, they can offer you personalised advertisements to encourage you to buy certain products. For example, a grocery store chain which has a location near where I live has learned that I always buy a certain brand of cheese, and so occasionally they will try to tempt me with something like a 50 cent discount on that cheese, or they will send me a message saying “Hey do you still want (the cheese brand)? We have it in stock!”
      3. Some people, when putting things into their basket or shopping cart, will see the large, advertised discounted price and think “this item is reasonably priced”, but then they forget to put their phone number in when checking out and are thus charged the inflated price. The store pockets the difference as customers are unlikely to notice or complain about it. Most people do not closely monitor the price of items as they are being scanned. They only look at the total price at the end before tapping their card.