Tiered pricing is EVERYWHERE now. In supermarkets, if you don’t have their app/loyalty card you have to pay higher prices. They frame it as a “discount” or “savings” for having the app, but clearly it’s just a punishment for not giving them your info and allowing them to track/advertise at you.
In restaurants/fast food places, you get “discounts” (i.e. regular prices) via the app/email list, and if you don’t have the app or give them your email address you don’t get the discount (read: you have to pay higher prices). And of course they can “tailor” personalised “deals” directly at you based on your past behaviour to optimise how much money they get out of you.
I just looked at a hotel and they’re advertising a “discount” if you give them your email address (read: a higher price if you don’t allow them to advertise at you).
I absolutely hate this behaviour. I know exactly why it’s there: some people are willing to pay more for convenience/no ads, and some are willing to go to more effort / put up with ads for a lower price. Either way they get more money out of you: the logical conclusion of capitalism and chasing higher profits.
It feels like this should be illegal. It feels like a cousin of price gouging, which is already illegal. Ofc it never will be outlawed in america - idk how much this happens across the pond though - but I hope one day this could be outlawed in europe.
I can’t stand it either. At least in most cases you can give a throwaway email to get the better pricing. It’s kind of the devil you know at this point.
Dynamic pricing, on the other hand, is true evil as I see it. Adjusting prices on the fly to suit whatever arbitrary condition is set by corporate jerkoffs…it’s price gouging in real time.
The thing that feels hopeless here is that “dynamic pricing” is like…the natural way to sell stuff if that makes sense? Standardized non-negotiated pricetags evolved as part of the growth of industrialization and mass consumerism. It just wasn’t feasible to have individual salespeople trying to milk each customer out of the most possible money for every transaction for small purchases, and big box stores eliminated the shopkeeper role as a quasi-salesperson who might do that from time to time. But that still IS how many, many sales work today. It’s just that “negotiated prices” are reserved for big ticket items where salespeople get a big enough cut. Real estate, B2B deals, new cars, etc are sold by salespeople whose main job is moneymilking based on what they think they can con the particular buyer into handing over.
Technology, as the great optimizer, is merely making the job of a salesperson automated enough to be applied at the Taco Bell drivethru using your personal data.
You can’t negotiate for your nachos though
Well yeah, your ability to negotiate was always the downside to this system
The time for negotiation is over.
But, that’s why I’m here
I’ve been considering just making a spam email vs my regular email. I know there are “temporary” email services but they don’t always apply. For example you are at a store and the say “you get a 5% if you give your email” and you want to use one of those one time emails what are you supposed to do? Stand there, take out your phone, “one sec, let me just spin up a email address to give you”.
Thinking of just creating a email account on say hotmail(just for the lols) and direct everything likely to spam me there. There is the argument “they will still track you and sell your data to advertisers who will send spam to that account”. Yeah but 1.why do I care if I never check the account? 2. If I use Hotmail all it will do is cause increase cost to Microsoft so double win?
So two thoughts:
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Get more comfortable with making these people wait. You want an email to give me a better price? That’s fine it will take me a minute to lookup my email address. It’s actually not that bad once you get used to doing this. I do it religiously now when I’m traveling and it’s never been an issue.
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Consider using DuckDuckGo’s email feature. They will quickly generate human-friendly throwaway addresses like “geek-rhino-spoon” at duck dot com. I have the ddg browser on my phone and once you have it set up, it takes just a second to search “ddg email” and first link goes to the page that generates a new address for you. So it’s super quick to do on the fly. When they forward emails to you, there is a banner at the top with a link to deactivate that throwaway address you used should you start getting spam. It’s pretty slick in my experience.
Edit: fixed a typo
Yeah but then I don’t get to make Microsoft spend money…
Ok fair point.
Granted its probably cents and less than a rounding error to them but…
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Nah fuck that. I’ll straight up in their face: “Sure mate, you can have my email. Just wait a sec while I spin up a new throw away.” They don’t give a shit if you do that. They’ll get their paycheck either way. Just don’t waste their time longer than necessary, they’ve also got managers breathing diwn their necks.
But what advantage does that have over just having 1 email account which you never check and only receives spam?
The only advantage I can see is maybe in several years it gets enough email that it fills up the free storage and I have to go delete everything twice a decade(being generous) but otherwise???
They cannot profile you. If you use a different email every visit or every few visits, they can’t keep track of you habits and purchases. They can’t sell your data. They can’t keep track of what other places you go to.
If you just use a single spam account, they can still profile you. They might even be able to link your “anonymous” data up with data they buy from google and such to find out more about you.
Yeah they profile a person who doesn’t exist…
I’ve been doing this since forever. The best part is that it costs money for them to send these spam emails, so they’re wasting money when they send to that account 😈
20-25 years ago it was our default behavior to fake these sorts of things. Somehow, we seem to have forgotten we can lie to computers.
Any place which uses phone numbers, use your local area code plus 867-5309 it works surprisingly often. Jenny probably has a bunch of points at 7/11…
In Protons Pass App you can create email-aliases on the fly, and if you have a domain you can use it too, which makes it possible to just write an email you want to use down and add it afterwards to your aliases, which is pretty nice (and every mailadress is then available of course) - i’m thinking to get a domain just for that feature since domains are such low cost items.
Yeah…its possible… Or take 30 seconds to make a Hotmail account and slowly let it fill up with spam…
I just use a separate Google email account. I already use several, for hobbies, little side hustles, etc. I got one that I use when I want the deal, but don’t want to give them my main email, and fill it full of spam.
But they’re onto that trick, so now the problem is that they want a phone number for text messages, and nobody wants to pay for a second line to send spam to.
I said this in another response but try (local area code) + 867-5309 it works on most stores. If it’s a national chain especially 212-867-5309 works.
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You’re right. I wish there was a way to stamp it out.
Somehow I feel ok with tiered pricing when it isn’t targetted/personalised.
This seems to be the general consensus. Group discount rates are also common: group of 4 gets discount compared to 4 separate people.
I recommend having and using a burner email address for these sorts of things. Phone number is trickier but also much less common in my experience. If it was common, I’d probably look into a burner Google Voice number.
This is IRL enshittification. Do you agree?
Yeah, especially with the proliferation of apps that you mentioned. It has definitely made me trim down who I’ll do business with because I don’t want 500 fucking apps on my phone.
Or they don’t care and just pay 30% more. Encouraging every other place to pull the same scam.
I keep saying it: just ban advertising.
They want to track what you buy to more efficiently manipulate you into buying what they want you to buy. The data would be almost useless if they couldn’t advertise to you, so they wouldn’t bother. Other places wouldn’t be able to monetize their spyware if advertisers weren’t buying. Political campaigns wouldn’t have even a use for millions in ‘donations’ if they weren’t blowing it all on advertising. It’s an entire multi-billion dollar industry built on lying to people for profit.
What is advertising then? When a company explains the benefit of its own product? A link to a particular product or service? Would word of mouth among consumers be a form of advertising? If not, then why not companies showing a word of mouth for other (affiliated) companies? What is the distinction between a company and the owner in the case of a sole proprietorship?
My point is, if this wasn’t obvious enough, there are so many obvious problems and loop holes with this approach, you should give it a think for 20 minutes and then start saying something else.
Require consent for advertising.
If I seek out information on your product or service then give it to me, sure. Otherwise fuck off forever out of my life, my internet, my art, my public spaces, my media, and everything else that you’ve ruined.
Now that that’s banned there’s much less reason for disgusting shit. My friend had a baby recently and the daycares consent demands the right to share data collected for marketing and market research purposes. This cannot be opted out of and is required to enroll, and there’s also this really gross thing where they do a separate photo consent form that implies that photos won’t be shared but when you read all the consents more thoroughly (there are several) you find that they retain all data including photos in perpetuity and it falls under the category that allows marketing and market research usage if they so choose. For children that are not even 1 year old!
This is a bigger issue on private equity owning care facilities (a whole other thing) but the fact of the matter is that advertisers have 0 ethics and will do whatever they want to whoever they want. They don’t care about consent because it’s an industry run by sociopaths with the mindset of rapists. They will destroy your product or service if you let them in and take their blood money. Once they’re in they will demand more and more until your product is shaped around advertising, either display or data collection to improve targeting for ad spend efficacy. They don’t care if it’s children, if it’s the elderly, the disabled, the extremely poor, etc. anyone can be sold to and anything can be sold. Let’s make some money. Fuck them, ban their industry, burn it down. If you work in advertising you are a piece of shit and the world is worse because you exist. You made bad choices and everyone is disappointed in you. Destroy the industry from within if you can, change careers, or die a piece of shit scumbag
How did you find out about the day care? Again, you “idea” is only quarter-baked at best. Your plan is to have me sign a consent form every time I enter a store with custom labels on the objects?
Seriously, fuck off with this nonsensical shit so the rest of us can focus on actual solutions. Because right now, all you are doing is wasting the bandwidth of your ISP, and everyone who has to mentally filter out your comment.
They asked me to look over the policy with them, which I did.
When you enter a store you are tacitly consenting to see products, obviously. What purpose does a store hold otherwise? But the walls don’t need to be plastered with advertisements for you to figure out that cereal is available to purchase.
Similarly in the point of a service like the daycare: if I look this up I am consenting. A service having a webpage isn’t an inherent problem. But when they can encroach on other actions that is breaching consent. When they can appear in unrelated web searches, in related websearches but priority ranking that’s not necessarily warranted, on unrelated or tangentially related websites, on walls in unrelated or tangentially related stores, as videos before unrelated or tangentially videos, etc. now they are the digital equivalent of litter. When they are in a newspaper, the unsolicited junk mail that keeps usps alive, etc they’re actual litter.
A directory is not the same as advertisement. It’s utilitarian and does not destroy everything it touches. But your shitty ad brain can’t conceptualize how this could ever work. You probably work for some company that does advertising bullshit and need to justify keeping some form of modern the unethical modern advertising machine around
Not ad brain, just a brain.
Notice all the little “Well, obviously not those ads” and implied consent scattered throughout your explanation? Did you even consider how much that would entrench current businesses if smaller companies couldn’t advertise? Or how that would proliferate enshittifying conglomerates that can package their products under a blanket consent form, locking out advertisements from competitors? How would this work for traditional advertisements like flyers, radio broadcasts, and billboards? If you banned those outright, all that remains is online advertisements, and if you think big tech has an entrenchment advantage now? Just wait until media platforms and ISPs are the gatekeepers of the most effective means of reaching customers and growing their business.
Lastly, do you have any conception of how much advertising subsidizes modern society? Think of everything from little leagues (which use corporate sponsors to pay for equipment and referees) to social media including lemmy! Every instance I know of includes an advertisement somewhere asking for donations to either support lemmy developers, or cover server cost. You could make them all paid services, but now you’ve locked out poor people from participating. Organizations could hide all functionality behind a consent form to show advertisements to subsidize cost, but then there is just a formality checkbox you must click before using any free online web service - solving exactly none of the actual issues around malware delivery, intrusive data collection, poor resource management, or even the most basic problem of advertisements being annoying.
I’m done here. Start thinking, and until then, stop wasting bytes and oxygen.
The best working definition I have come up with is banning ‘one party giving payment, in the form of money, goods, and/or services, to a second party in exchange for the display of media to a third party, in specific or in general, who did not explicitly request to be shown that media.’ This would cover the vast majority of problematic advertising. And it’s absurd to pretend it has to be ‘done in one.’ If more laws need to be made to counter loopholes because the sociopaths in the marketing department refuse to get real jobs, more laws can be made until companies’ decision-makers realise how much the marketing department is costing them in fees and implementation relative to the imperceptible benefit of having them.
Companies can still use their own spaces to display relevant product information. (i.e. factual, specific information on products that are present and being offered at the location of the informational media)
Word of mouth, if not caused by coercion or compensation, is not disingenuous, so not a problem. If you really love Brand X so much that you want to let everyone know about it when you talk to them, great. That means it’s such a genuinely good product that you feel love for it. That’d essentially be the goal. If they have to pay you to praise it, it’s not a good product.
Corporate personhood also needs to go, so no difference should be recognized between what a company does and what its proprietor does. The owner should not ask/allow their representatives to do things in their name for which they do not wish to be held responsible.
As for ‘…companies showing a word of mouth…’ That’s going to need rephrasing.
Trust me. I haven’t been just spouting off about how harmful advertising is without thinking about it. I already know it will make starting new small businesses harder, and I have considered loosening the rule to only apply to businesses with positive cashflow AND/OR with revenues over <some number, maybe 10>x the median wage. That would allow small business owners to have some leeway during their early days and scale with inflation/economic changes.
Other than that, I’ve never heard any remotely sensible arguments against it. Advertising is like nuclear weapons. It pollutes the (information) environment around it and distorts people’s behaviour in all sorts of ways, and companies only need to have it because other companies have it. As seen with american tobacco companies when their ads were banned, it lowers expenses and people who want the product still buy the product. It’s a net benefit for everyone except for marketing firms, but so what? We didn’t keep putting lead in the gasoline just to keep the jobs in the lead mining industry.
The data would be almost useless if they couldn’t advertise to you, so they wouldn’t bother.
I dunno.
I think they would still collect and use the data to track our political leanings and whether we’re considering becoming a journalist that threatens their empire.
Intelligence agencies will always try to gather more info, but they also love having private corporations do the legwork to get the data they can then just steal. Reducing private data collection would reduce government surveillance as well, or at least make the governments do it themselves which would make it subject to certain laws that are circumvented by having private entities do it.
Would banning advertising also include what packaging looks like on store shelves? Becsuse if not, I can see shit getting way worse with how shit is laid out or boxed if they were banned from advertising elsewhere. The product would be advertising itself even louder.
Products already aim to have attention-grabbing / attractive packaging. So I don’t think that is going to get any worse if general advertising is banned.
I’ve also been saying for years that unsolicited advertising is wasteful and harmful and unnecessary - and should be banned. (Well, it’s ‘necessary’ from an individual point of view, because you need it to be viable vs other products. But that would not be the case if it was banned. The massive work and resources spend on advertising are only necessary because of advertising. Killing it would free up those resources for something actually productive.)
There are obviously a lot of tricky issues and edge cases that would need to be ironed out for an advertising ban; but that doesn’t make it impossible. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be an improvement, and it’s not hard to imagine some basic guidelines that would work reasonably well. … That said, it’s complete fantasy that this would happen, because there is too much money tied up in it. The only realistic way forward would be a very slow gradual increase in weak rules about what kinds of advertising can be used.
Stop Ive already came and can only get so erect.
Then you’re not trying hard enough.
dude just use the store card like the rest of the town. number’s 8675309
I… cant tell if this is real. I feel like someone probably made an account with that phone number though
100% real. When I worked at a store that had “loyalty accounts” and someone didn’t want to sign up, I’d (quietly) tell them to use (local area code) 687-5309 so they’d still get a discount. Every time I’ve tried it somewhere, an account already existed.
The lucky person who owns this account is swimming in gas rewards, I bet.
totally real. just use it. if it’s one of those stores with gas benefits i bet you could try there too, but i bet those get drained fast
Whelp, im going to quickly find out how many accounts i can cancel
None? It doesn’t work that way. if you call up and tell them you want to close the 867-5309 account they’ll laugh at you because they themselves use it
If i have an account at a store with a loyalty and theyre using my data, and i can now use the Tommy Tutone code to get same loyalty rewards, i can cancel my account and stop giving them my data.
oh i have the stupid. i have been dealing with wannabe edgy teenagers all day and “hehehe i’ll go cancel all the 8675309s” is just the kind of stupid they infected me with.
Wait a minute…
The local Kroger’s senior citizen card # is (area code) 6345-789
Jenn
Yes, price discrimination is discrimination and should be illegal.
I live in Japan. The weak yen meant it was hard to afford traveling overseas even to see my family. Now, thanks to overtourism, it’s hard to even travel domestically because hotels and places increase prices to get tourist money pricing locals out. In this context, I’m perfectly happy to have resident vs tourist tiered pricing. Some hotel prices have doubled.or even tripled compared to when I got here and my salary has certainly not made that same jump (and indeed my salary converted to USD is more like what I made 20+ years ago in the US).
Discounts for seniors (health copays here even drop with age), disabled, students, etc. make sense to me.
I am not a fan of loyalty-card-based discounts or anything like that.
Payment methods I get because the processors take a cut. I have a small business so I either punish people paying with cash by raising all prices or have other payment methods priced to offset the processor’s cut (I sell produce from my tiny farm). I don’t want to punish people paying in cash to support card payments. Cashless societies have a lot of dangers and punish those suffering from being unhoused and other issues, but that’s a whole other story.
I get wanting to fleece the tourists, the same logic pick pockets and other scammers use, but it seems misplaced. I seriously doubt most tourists are wealthy. You’re advocating tfor exploiting people who’ve saved up for that dream vacation in a faraway land
I think people being able to afford to go out to eat in their own neighborhoods or travel in their own country is more important. It’s not some desire to “fleece tourists”; Japan is not your Disney world and its residents aren’t actors.
Edit: no, autocorrect, I did no mean “it’s” for the possessive
Of course not. Yet they have a unique and valuable culture that others may wish to experience
As someone who lives in a city that’s a major tourist destination, I appreciate that our visitors learn more about us and the money they spend encourages development of more destinations that I also can appreciate
I don’t see how a visitor wanting to experience a cultures food takes anything away from its citizens, nor is it necessarily more expensive.
The problem is the locals get priced out. Capitalism gonna capitalism (and, less cynically, more workers = more labor costs are needed to meet demand), so prices will rise to get max profits and cover additional costs. Japan’s wages have been stagnant for ages. Since corona, we got hit with huge inflation and price increases years in the making. Some employers have increased salaries, but others not. Basically no increases are keeping up with inflation for those who get it. This is even worse for those on fixed incomes.
What this means is that overtourism is causing a few things. One is that (often illegal) short-term rentals are being created and people are buying entire buildings, jacking up the rent, and forcing out tenants and increasing rents generally. This especially hurts the elderly and those on fixed incomes. People are also buying vacation houses which further reduces the housing stock and drives up prices where locals cannot compete with the deep pockets of those whom are not residents. These people get pushed out into more hellish commutes and into other areas, basically becoming second-class people in their own country. Some laws are being drafted to address this (and better enforcement of illegal short-term rentals is needed), but all the people who got screwed over aren’t going to get anything out of this.
Restaurants also end up increasing prices that tourists can afford but locals cannot. Hotels are doing the same. People have to live further away from work, eat out less (or not at all), not go on vacations as much or at all due to hotel prices, etc. It’s also resulted in hiring foreign-language staff whose salaries are more expensive in some cases. Tourists also get tax free shopping in some cases which means some of the money they spend isn’t even helping deal with these issues. (I’m in favor of abolishing that tax free program, personally).
So, again, this isn’t about fleecing any tourists. There are a number of problems caused by those whose currencies go a long way in Japan making life harder and more expensive for locals. Tiered pricing for tourists is one potential way to handle some aspects of this. Believe me, as a long-term (more than a decade and now holding permanent residency), this would still be annoying as we’d have to be presenting ID everywhere. It’s further murky because many Japanese still don’t even have a photo ID (though it’s effectively becoming mandatory for at least adults now) so the implementation is quite annoying.
Further, the price on foreign resident administrative fees is being jacked up by wild amounts to be “in line with europe” with some of that money going to overtourism (note what I said about salaries above; the median annual salary in a lot of Japan is below 5 million yen which is around 30k USD as I write this). This is just idiotic policy in my mind, but it shows that the government is trying to shift the pain away from Japanese citizens)
This is also not a problem unique to Japan and many countries have faced it. Some of those countries did indeed decide on tiered pricing. Some use certain entry taxes. I’m sure there are other programs as well. My point is that overtourism is hurting residents in a number of ways and something needs to be done to address this; tourism should not make life unaffordable for the average resident (and, to be clear, I’m not talking luxury resorts or something here).
I want them to stop saying something is 399 and just come out and say it’s 400.
Even better, make it mandatory to display the price you’ll pay at the cash register, including all taxes, etc.
Like the majority of countries do
Yeah, Australia has that law. However, in recently years it has started to erode a little.
Cashless one-tap card payments have become very popular, because they were fast and no cost. Pretty convenient… except that more recently there are now transaction fees associated with them, and the fees vary from place to place. … So when it comes time to pay, often the price is a couple of percent higher than quoted. It isn’t much, but it is does make it harder to know what you’re actually going to pay. And it also feels like a bait-and-switch, since it built popularity by being free and now starts to increase nickle-and-dime people.
Anyway, that’s all minor small-fry stuff compared to the tax-excluding price bullshit in the USA.
Yes. It should all be cost accounted, not “feelings” of value or, “whatever the rube will pay”. I want to buy something for a dollar that costs a dollar. I don’t want to pay two dollars for a one dollar item and then have fake “points” thrown at me. Whenever things get too complicated you know people are scamming.
Yes, it’s clearly a prong of a breach of the public trust…late stage capitalism stuff.
In the context of a supermarket (but applies to most other sectors), the major players have functionally agreed to split territory rather than compete for existing ones. So, in lieu of competition, basically what we see is forced loyalty where they attempt to capture each consumer entirely in their networks. It’s the answer to the “Wal-Martification” of the west: there’s still a skeleton of anti-trust so we’re not seeing 3 Wal-Marts split up the world…we’re seeing alliances of mega-corporations from different sectors work together.
What this looks like is your grocery store soft forcing you to use their preferred bank, gas station, sporting good store, etc, in exchange for what used to be normal prices. The only way you can avoid it is by having more money so you can join a more elite network that gives you a different illusion of selection and deals.
The horse has almost entirely left the barn. Long ago we allowed retailers to envelop too many sectors, retailers to own their manufacturers, retailers to forge monopolies. It was, of course, all promised to bring savings to the consumer…but all it does is bring profits to the few.
I just give them my old landline number that’s been disconnected for years since I just use my cell phone now
they are satisfied that you identify yourself consistently with the same number.
they don’t want to call you, what they want is to track you
They do want to call me. I had a significant decrease in spam calls after I started doing this instead of my actual number, including calls from companies I’ve definitely never given my number to, as well as straight up scammers.
However, you have a good point about tracking.
Every single time I’ve tried the local area code plus 876-5309 has worked… Been using it since the days you’d enter a phone number to print coupons from a kiosk (I didn’t have a phone at the time). Now I enter it as second nature anytime a pin pad prompts me for a number.
Then what do you do when the next step requires “verifying the number”?
I generate a new email address for each vendor that forces me to specify one, but there’s not much I can do about phone numbers. I suppose it’s good from a security perspective that they want an additional authentication factor even if it’s only SMS, and good from a usability perspective to verify a path to resetting a password, but I can’t generate a new 🆕 hone number for every vendor
It depends.
Tiers based on age, disability, or ability to pay (e.g. child/senior tickets, lower prices for people who might not be able to fully enjoy an activity due to a disability, low-income people getting cheaper bus fares, etc) are all generally okay, because they expand access, tend to make things more affordable for those who actually need it, but don’t cause massive unjust increases in pricing for others.
Personalized pricing however should be illegal in most cases. (e.g. you order McDonald’s through the app and they charge you an extra $0.10 on every item compared to the in-store menu just because you got your paycheck recently.)
As for all the discount/reward/loyalty programs, I’d say it depends. If my small local grocery store gives me coupons in their email newsletter, that’s fine. Hell, even if larger chains do it, if the discounts are on a specific selection of items, and are probably designed to get you to spend money on stuff you otherwise wouldn’t have purchased, it doesn’t really matter to me if I can get them or not by giving my email, and isn’t that unfair.
If your rewards app is akin to a punch card like the one at my local ice cream place where if you buy 10 scoops, you get another one free, that’s also fine. It’s just a way to keep track of how loyal you are to the business so they know when you’re allowed a little bonus, and they benefit from you coming back to them instead of another place, because you’re betting on that free scoop.
If a place prices everything higher than they would normally do it should they not have an app, then requires you giving up sensitive personal details to lower it back down to a reasonable rate, that’s unfair, and should be banned.
If the place prices items down just a little lower than they would normally price items even if they didn’t have an app/newsletter, because apps/newsletters are generally just a good way to keep customers around and increase sales, that’s fine by me. (e.g. if my local grocery store just sends me an email saying “hey, we now have X item in stock” and it interests me, they’re gonna get a sale they otherwise would not have gotten had I not been signed up to their newsletter, and that offsets a small discount on everything else I buy there)
Nah… just make privacy laws instead.
If it’s illegal to collect all of this data on people, there won’t be loyalty cards or anything like that anymore, since there’s no data they could sell. They won’t be jamming targeted ads into every goddamn thing either since there’s no way to target anyone. Of course the social media algorithms also would be able to make targeting recommendations, but I don’t think it would be a bad thing if we had the same shit recommended to us and we’d have to actually search for things or have things recommended by other people instead of algorithms.
And we wouldn’t have creepy marketing people crunching personal data to figure out how to manipulate people into buying shit they don’t need.
I pay for an email alias service, every service gets a unique email which I can disable or delete when they start spamming.
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It starts that way. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. Instead of straight discounts they have started with bonus missions where you have to buy x amount of this certain brand to get 1 more for free and stuff and it’s just maniacal
It’s just another thing which will enshittyfy with time
In my opinion dynamic pricing is the worst thing that any company can provide. I imagine it’s only going to get more popular in the future considering how much data is available now, too.
Even data collection from a grocery store isn’t inherently problematic. With all the perishables they have it helps plan inventory if they have more data.
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I definitely agree
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a grocery store where, when asked if I had the loyalty card and I said no, they didn’t just scan their own thereby giving me the discounted prices.
