WAY OFF: Insidious business practices

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Matthew Braun wrote:

=> K Henderson <henderson.120 at OSU.EDU> writes:
=>
=> >And ok, yeah, I'm free to pay more for my groceries to not have the card,
=> >but why the *$@#!)$ should I?!
=> Uh, 'cause you value your privacy more than the savings?

That must be why he posts to a mailing list that maintains a permanent
archive of everything he says for all the world to read, I guess.
Where is the opt-out on BOC-L?  Oh, the horror! :-)

=> Likewise.  I want to simply go to my local grocery store, get what I need,
=> and get done.

You mean you can't?  I guess Illinois must be like Ohio...

=> >The problem is...they force you to play their game, or waste money.
=>  I agree that we shouldn't have to pay what is, in effect, a privacy tax.

Damn those Big Corporations forcing us like that!  Sometimes they even
have the nerve to put up prices instead of cutting them like they
should.  We shouldn't have to pay what is in effect a cost of doing
business tax!  This is disgraceful!!  The government should step in and
put an end to this barbaric practice.

=> You can sell them the information and are rewarded through rebates, or you

You mean getting money off when you use the card isn't some kind of
reward/rebate?  If they did rebates, heck, I'd have to give them a
legitimate postal address to mail the thing to... :-(

Plus, can you imagine how the lines would grow at the checkouts with
people haggling over how much to sell their information for.  ("You want
to give me 0.005 cents for the knowledge I buy coffee beans every second
Tuesday?  Pah!  I spit on your lousy 0.005 cents!  I will take no less
than 0.007 cents or be damned!!")

=> Yep.  We should be free to conduct the business of living without being
=> pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.

You could always shop at Annie Kay's or Eats.  Eats' even still use a
mechanical slider machine for credit cards.

I can't help feeling that somewhere in all this appears to have been
lost the fact that Kroger are a business beholden to their shareholders,
and not in fact a charity.  Obviously, they've decided that knowing what
customers buy is useful to their business model and ongoing operations,
and that this card scheme (rewarded by savings and other incentives to
participate) is a cost-effective way to implement this.  Kroger have
been trying to find out what people buy in their stores since they
began.  All shops do it, even little corner shops ("'ello Paul, the
usual, is it?").  This just makes it easier and more accurate and cost
effective for them.  I'm sure they would open up the shop for free, if
it were not for those mean shareholders.  Believe me when I say this.

=> Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less easy as technology marches on...

Okay, if Kroger started selling groceries online, via a WWW site that
required cookies, would that satisfy everyone? ;-)

The thing that narks me is that they won't let me access my data.  (Of
course, I realise that they pay for its storage and collection, so I'm
not surprised, really.)  It would be useful for budgeting, for example.
Plus, if record stores did this, it would be a great way to track the
evolution of your record collection.  It's a shame that my CD player
doesn't keep a history of what I play, because then I could easily
settle the thorny question of what gets played more: _Space Ritual_ or
_Hall of the Mountain Grill_...

(Excuse the flippancy, please.)

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
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