Comment by gruez
5 months ago
That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don't think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it's a loyalty program you really shouldn't be surprised that they're tracking your purchase history. That's basically the entire premise.
In Germany, the major cross-merchant loyalty program Payback gives you one or two rounds of extra consent choices about the tracking, and the type we see here is absolutely not mandatory for participating. It does of course let them give you more personalized and useful coupons, but one can participate while declining that permission.
> it's a loyalty program
calling something loyalty does not make it "loyalty" ..
So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts,
- Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track.
- Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiated pricing is just getting their hands into everyone's pockets.The free market principles rely on perfect knowledge, and every step made to make pricing harder is an attack against self market regulation.
Price discrimination is illegal even in Lobby-land, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13
Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold is more equalized.
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That's just the standard term for such programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_program
It's the normal term, in that it has been normalized as such. But it is otherwise not accurate except in the barest, most monetaristically self-fulfilling-prophecy way.