This article was originally published by The Markup.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1448547
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1448547
For better or worse, this is exactly why my wife and I do this. We’ve shopped at Kroger’s for as long as I remember and use a loyalty card. As a result, we receive personalized coupons on things we use every day and significant discounts on gasoline. For every $100 spent at Kroger, we receive a $0.10 discount per gallon. Some months, that amounts to $0.40 per gallon…therefore, filling up the tank for $6.40 less than full price (which tends to be competitive with other stations).
We pay for everything with our credit card and leverage our credit card points for Kroger gift cards. There are months where we pay next to nothing for groceries.
Yes, we know they are tracking us but we leverage the benefit to the hilt.
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We also have few options beyond Kroger’s and we also leverage what they are doing to us to our benefit. But there is a side note - they have gone from being the nice stable supermarket in our neighborhood of almost 30 years where we knew most of the people by name to a frenetic, disorganized mess filled with angry employees, shitty service and huge lines at all check out areas.
Why do I keep sounding like a cranky old man?
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I am a woman and I agree with you 100% about Kroger stores
Not to mention they force you to use self checkout with no scanner for heavy items like water ect.
I do fill out they survey weekly for 50 extra gas points and give them hell
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Oh No!
It is not like I purchase everything with a credit card, carry my phone everywhere I go, have a Fit Bit, or every time I search an item I get adds on my phone.
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I guess we are pretty useless to them. We do use our Kroger card and our Whole Foods app to get the discounts at those stores but we never pay any attention to the “coupons” on the back of our receipt because they are never for anything we want to buy. We are vegetarians on the more vegan end of the spectrum and we buy pretty much unprocessed foods and mostly from the fruit and veg areas. Not interested in the vast expanse of junk except for our one big vice, Cokes. As for Amazon, as they have changed their models of what shows up, they become less and less useful for us. Mostly we have Prime for access to Brit Box and Acorn.
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We used to have Kroger’s here in St. Louis, but they’ve been gone, at least in my city since the late 70s. We have two very strong local and regional supermarkets. And yes I have each of their loyalty cards.
I don’t pay attention to coupons, I do pay attention on sale signage in the stores.
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Wonder if the day will come when someone is denied some insurance coverage because they bought bacon for years. I recall reading somewhere that auto insurers were considering rate increases for anti vaxers because of risky behavior
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I receive bacon coupons every week. Perhaps I should sue the store for encouraging my addiction to the salty, fatty goodness?
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Okay, so we all know we’re being tracked and monetized as a product in all sorts of ways, but maybe one red line we could draw is to avoid using brand-specific apps on our phones that facilitate in-store tracking. Where that’s available, that is.
I do my bulk grocery shopping at a local Safeway (Albertsons owned). I use the loyalty program that discounts the purchase and saves money at the associated gas station, but it’s just punching in a phone number at the CC reader on checkout. No phone app.
The gas savings is actually the main reason I shop there instead of a slightly better grocery store in town. On most fill-ups I get $1.00 off per gallon, a combination of what I’m spending for groceries and the fact that we barely drive our car much at all, so the discount adds up between fill-ups.
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This is exactly what I said to my dumbass, anti-vax uncle who said he didn’t want to be “chipped.” I told him, “they” already know exactly where you are (phone and toll tag) and what you do (credit card).
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From another cranky old man, I’ve seen that shift at the local Safeway too. I’m naturally crowd-averse as it is, so even before the pandemic I was doing my grocery shopping at 7am to avoid the crowds, then kicked it back to 6am during the pandemic. I’m back to 7am and there are still only two or three other shoppers in the store when I’m there. Virtue of a small town, I’m sure some big city stores are more crowded then.
The downside is they often don’t staff the checkouts at that hour, only the self-checkout is ready, so I have to find someone to open a register. I usually have a full shopping cart and I can get out the door about three times faster with assisted checkout than with self-checkout. They always respond and open a checkout lane, but sometimes they grumble about it. Dude, I’m trying to save your job here!
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I’m a regular Kroger shopper here in A2 but I’m skeptical that the data on me that some third party buys is going to yield them anything useful.
I do zero shopping via my phone. I only use my Kroger loyalty card at the checkout, which can save me a decent amount depending on the item. As for the coupons that are spit out along with my receipt, I have never once found an item on them that I would consider buying. I buy no candy or pop; my only junk food purchase is the occasional bag of potato chips. My food expenditures there are on basics like vegetables and fruit, occasionally meat, juice, Kroger brand dairy products, TP/paper towels, and cleaning products.
As for vulnerability to personalized advertising based on my shopping habits, where am I going to encounter it? I’m not on Facebook, and the multitudinous ads for shitty rando businesses I encounter on twitter are useless to the advertisers because I routinely block all promoted accounts; the total number of promoted twitter accounts I’ve blocked is now over 13,500. I have an IG account, but I routinely block or hide advertisers there just like I do on twitter. I can’t think of the last time I purchased something primarily because I saw it for the first time on the internet or social media. Hell, I see almost no regular non-personalized advertising—I watch essentially zero network and cable TV; 98% of what I watch is on on Prime’s Britbox or Acorn, or science videos on Youtube, whose commercials for stuff I would never buy anyhow I routinely skip through. I don’t have ESPN any more so I’m not encountering the gigantic number of ads infecting televised sports.
Same goes for the piles of physical junk mail I get in the mail box—all of it goes directly into the recycling bin without examination.
I suppose it’s conceivable that insurance companies could buy data on food or alcohol purchases to deny coverage based on health, but I think that’s off in the future a bit.
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And you thought those hot dogs in your cart were the product. Now, it seems, you are. I wonder what our price calculates to in cost per ounce? If you see a pricing gun wielded your way, run.
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True, but life as product gets old, don’t you know.
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“About three times faster”
You are correct.
Average checker: 18 items per minute.
Average U-scan: 6 items per minute.
(Kroger study)
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How much do they pay me to scan it myself? Oh yeah, nothing. Bastards.
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One of the selling points of the Apple Card was that they made it impossible (very difficult?) for the stores and banks to track your purchases.
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I’ve been in the digital media business for 15 years, and helped pioneer some of the behavioral targeting technologies that originated out of Seattle, Mountain View, California, and New York. So if you’ve ever been annoyed because you bought, say, a pair of shoes or shopped for a leaf blower, and then observed that every digital ad you saw for a month was for shoes or power tools I want to say that I’m sorry.
It is 100% true that Kroger and many other stores and online retailers are capturing your purchase data to sell targeted advertising. Of all of the companies doing this I’m least bothered by the groceries stores because, at least, the value proposition between using a loyalty card and/or the mobile app leads to consumers getting lower prices through coupons. (To make a finer point on this, just think of Google as a company that provides you free software (search, maps, email, etc.) in exchange for the right to profile and target you.) The stores could make that value proposition more clear. I think they should, in fact. The vast majority of people won’t care if their purchase behavior is tracked if it means savings.
The truth is that every company or non-profit that can collect and sell valuable consumer data is doing so. Everything is an ad network. Ironically, the moves by Apple and Google to restrict what data can be collected via browser cookies and mobile app identifiers is accelerating this trend. Companies like Kroger, Amazon, The Gap, etc. that have logged in user data - especially an email address - via their loyalty programs or online purchase patterns now use email addresses, physical addresses, or phone numbers to build audience graphs. So we’ve gone from the relative anonymity of a browser cookie or mobile phone identifier to targeting by the most personal of personally identifiable information. The value of this data is so significant that one might argue that Amazon and other online retailers run their retail businesses for the benefit of their high margin advertising businesses. Certainly Amazon’s ad business accounts for a very large percentage of its net profit.
The other aspect to all of this is that the data ultimately helps benefit publishers, potentially even Talking Points Memo. I don’t know anything about TPM’s ad tech stack. What I do know is that I’m logged in to TPM with the same email address that I use for my Kroger loyalty program. Through the various ad tech companies it is entirely possible for, say, Proctor and Gamble to connect my purchase of Tide Detergent to my presence on this site. That would mean P&G would pay an increased ad rate to TPM to serve me a targeted ad. Personally, I’m okay with that because I enjoy the writing of the sites I frequent, and I want them to have the money to continue doing what they are doing. Again, I believe retailers and publishers should be explicit about that bargain. (BTW, if you’ve noticed a massive influx of publishers asking you to sign up for their emailed daily newsletter it is because they want your email address to help build an audience graph against which they may sell targeted advertising.)
I’ll repeat that I think publishers, retailers, and companies that buy advertising should be explicit about how data is collected and used. Ever since the detergent companies began sponsoring television we’ve all been in the ecosystem of advertiser subsidized media. We now also have advertiser subsidized software and social media. If companies want to use advertising dollars to underwrite their media businesses or retailer businesses then they should be clear about that.
I also think those companies should write their Congress critters to demand that Apple and Google stop artificially restricting how data on browsers or phones is used. Apple, in particular, is restricting how mobile phone identifiers are used. They claim this is in the name of “privacy.” At the same time Apple is building an advertising business that has privileged access to the data collected by your phone. This means that publishers such as TPM, and also publishers like Facebook and Twitter, are realizing lower advertising revenue. Again, it should be clear to everyone that if the moment you go online or turn on your television that your past online behavior or real world purchases can be used to serve you a targeted ad. Apple’s war with Facebook has also damaged many other businesses. I’ll refer you to the newsletters collecting email addresses. My solution to not wanting Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to profit from my online activity is to not go to Facebook and Twitter. I feel differently about Josh Marshall profiting from my presence on this site.
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Not a grocery, but that is one of my main issues with Lowes. During the weekdays, they frequently have no one on a register. There are two exceptions, the contractor/lumber area and the garden center. Guess where I check out most of the time.
But why they want to force people with complicated and bulky loads into self checkout and slow it all down is a mystery. They will have several people still assisting. Don’t see the savings in that at all. Plus they have frustrated their customers.
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