Science Friday: Jamming the Till
Certainly one of the most obnoxious trends in retail in the past few years is the “customer loyalty program.” You know: those little cards or key-ring hangers that you now have to scan at the register to get the sale prices that you used to get just for showing up during the sale? Why exactly does a grocery store or other retailer need to know this much about its customers? Isn’t it enough to put out good merchandise at a good price, advertise it, and make it easy to find on the shelves?
Apparently not. Retailers think we enjoy getting “special recognition” and “personalized” deals (you know, those coupons printed at the register), and that makes some difference about what store we go to. Maybe it does for some people. But for me, what I put in my grocery cart is my own damned business – not for any sinister reason, but just on principle. That’s why I was delighted to read this article that appeared in CIO Insight (a trade rag for corporate IT planners) last December, which cropped up in the research I’ve been doing for my client, the Borg. Here are some choice bits:
But not all your customers are so positive [heh! You think? – RS], and the irrepressible march of cheap, prevalent technology is making it easier for them to rebel against what they see as the encroachment of corporate CRM. Take a look at this URL before reading on. One of my colleagues who participates in our weak-signals research program came across it in early October 2003—it's just the sort of aberrant customer behavior [emphasis added – RS] that we seek to identify and then track over time. I wonder how many people are now participating, and how far the impact is spreading?
The Web site offers a way for people to swap bar-coded ID numbers from supermarket and other loyalty program cards, and to generate and print copies of other people's numbers to use on their own cards. You can also generate randomized numbers that could be a part of the program, but aren't necessarily issued yet, effectively polluting the CRM databases with both misinformation and noise. Although it's probable that only a small number of people are doing this so far, the problem with noisy customer databases is that if you can't trust all of it, pretty soon you can't trust any of it—essentially rendering useless all your expensively collected, stored and analyzed information.
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…[E]fforts to render that same customer data less reliable, and perhaps even meaningless, represent an important and adverse development for the companies that are coming to rely on knowing who their customers are as well as what they're buying.
And gee, that’s so too bad!
Listen, I used to work in retail marketing. It’s a cutthroat business and I know these folks will do anything they think will give them an edge. But snooping on your customers, charging higher prices to people who refuse to participate, creating these massive databases of buying patterns that could very easily be linked to all kinds of other personal information to give complete strangers and corporate hucksters a window into our lives so they can ply us with more junk and come-ons… I’m sorry, that’s a little too much.
Luckily, it’s not too hard to fight back. We don’t need the government here; all it takes is a little ingenuity and personal initiative to drop a turd in their punchbowl. Check out the Bonus Card Swap Meet site for more information.
8:40:46 AM 
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