nerdcereal.com

I’ve known that supermarket club cards are used for tracking users’ buying habits but it just dawned on me today that they are essentially the same as cookies, used by websites for tracking browsing habits online.

The interesting part of this type of statistical tracking is that it’s faceless. I lost my old card and just received a new today. The cashier gave me a form which I could fill out and send in, but what’s the point? I still get my discount. They’re not trying to link you with your groceries; they’re trying to average you with other consumers so they figure out different consumer stereotypes and ultimately make more money. The questions they can answer with these data are “someone who buys product A also buys product B” or “someone who buys product C shops twice a week while someone who buys product D shops every other day.”

These data are demographical and don’t really have anything to do with the card-carrying consumer. Cookies track the same sort of data: “users who visited site A also visit site B,” “users come to this page C more frequently than page D,” and “users stay on this site for X amount of minutes.”

The facelessness of club cards and cookies protects consumers’ individual privacy but they are still a little mischievous because the tracking is, for the most part, unseen. Club cards are disguised to be a money-saving privilege (afforded indiscriminately) rather than tracking tags similar to those tacked on to wild animals for studies. And cookies are all but invisible to non-technical Internet surfers.

Due to its physicality, the future of club cards has the potential to be more ominous when considering the possibility of adding RFID tags to them. RFIDs are already being added to many products in the store; why not go one step further and put them on the shoppers? This way the stores can figure out how long it takes to decide whether to buy Aquafina or Dasani or your exact path through the store upon entrance and exit of the automatic sliding doors.