If there has to be a card and I am hoping it is keeping costs down somehow (better shipping?), I prefer a grocery that has reasonable prices and maybe a good deal on some items with the loyalty card. Some groceries have ridiculous prices and the card only gets it down to reasonable. If I am traveling and don’t have a card for that grocery, this is annoying.

Harris Teeter tracks my purchases and gives a small piece to the local art center. Every year I have to choose the school, etc I want to support.

They also send me an email once a week with the sale flyer in it. I can see items I have bought before on the top of the email and make a shopping list. I don’t usually use this much except when raspberries are on sale. This is something I really, really, like to know.

Wanting to have the loyality cards work for me not just the store I sent the following letter to our three local grocery chain stores. King Soopers, Safeway, and Albertsons.

I don’t use shopping lists so I didn’t put two and two together until a recent shopping trip with my mother.

My mother uses shopping lists that are hand written and I assumed were written fresh every time I took her shopping. Not true, she uses the same list over and over with the usual items she buys noted so she won’t forget.

Well that led me to think why don’t the customers get to use their loyalty card for more than just savings. Give us back the information you collect for our use.

When we enter the store there should be a kiosk where we enter out loyalty card and a shopping list is printed out .

This would provide convenience for us the customer and marketing opportunities for you the store.

First the list should be in order of location in the store. I know not everyone operates in a linear fashion when entering a store, but please reward those organized enough to use a list. And don’t forget two entrances require two different lists.

Highlight or color those items that are bought in a time repeat frequency. Just a reminder that we might be running out of our usual purchase.

If you have a special on items I usually purchase please highlight or color those items. I might not need them right then but the special price might get me to purchase.

I am very brand loyal and wouldn’t be interested, but for your other customers you could alert them to brand savings. You might even charge brands for this notation, and the change could be very easy to track.

Automatic coupons noted for items I usually buy. No need to cut them out of the newspaper I don’t read. And no need for you to keep all those little slips of paper.

I’m sure there are many marketing possibilities that I haven’t thought of, BUT be careful not to clutter up the list with too much. Maybe use the back of the sheet for advertisements.

I am also sending this to other stores where I have loyalty cards.

1) If your concern is only the heft of the card in your wallet, then even if they don’t shout out for someone else’s card, most of the grocery stores I deal with will let you type your phone number into the PIN pad (or tell it to the cashier) and use that in lieu of your card. I misplaced by Safeway card years ago, but I’ve been using it anyway via my phone number.

2) If your concern is privacy, sign up for a new card under a made-up name, address, and phone number.

3) If you are concerned with both, sign up for a new card under a made-up name, address, and phone number — then remember the made-up phone number and don’t carry the cards.

By the way, I haven’t seen the “calling out for cards” around here, but I’ve seen something even dumber, from the point of view of collecting data — some stores have the cashiers’ keep a card behind the register SPECIFICALLY DESIGNATED to give the discount to people who say they forgot their card. This card basically has “data on hundreds if not thousands of people who claim to have forgotten their cards” which is probably only slightly more useful than overall sales data. If this is really corporate policy, not just store managers and/or cashiers trying to avoid the I-didn’t-get-the-best-price complainst, it would seem to indicate that the real goal is price discrimination, not collecting data. However, it doesn’t work for that, either. More than once I’ve been in a store where I don’t shop often and have been asked if I had a card — and when I said no, the cashier just pulled out the store card and gave me the discount anyway.

Welcome to the March 14, 2005 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, the Internet’s most intriguing weekly round-up of free-market articles. We have some superb entries this week, and all are well worth reading. Affiliate Recruiting Blog – Franklin Ba…

Amazon takes a large chunk of change off the top– leaving pennies, literally, pennies to the small publisher and his or her author, to share. The idea is that more books will sell, and the profits will accumulate accordingly, but…the reality is that even Amazon is more supportive of the named authors, of the big guys, of the books that will sell hundreds of thousands. So, again, the new, emerging author struggling to market his or her book, and to make enough money to be able to write another book, looses.

Amazon is a great company. I am not saying boycott Amazon. I’m just saying, be aware that they, too, have a loyalty program. It’s called free shipping. Now, THAT’S what other companies need to learn. How to build loyalty without causing customers annoyance. And, I hope you’ll give us small publishers a chance to compete… we just want to get our authors the attention they deserve.

Welcome to the March 14, 2005 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, the Internet’s most intriguing weekly round-up of free-market articles. We have some superb entries this week, and all are well worth reading. Affiliate Recruiting Blog – Franklin Ba…

If you choose not to play, you subsidize the store.

I wrote about this issue before, and my arguments are the same as Luca’s above.
(http://lazax.com/blog/archives/000077.html)