Consumer Privacy Rights and Your Peanut Butter

Do you use loyalty cards at the grocery store or the drug store? Those are the cards that you swipe at the checkout to get an extra 35 cents off your peanut butter.

As well as giving you a reduced cost on the shelf price for your goods, they are used by the grocer to keep track of your purchases to get a profile of your habits. The stores can then use your profile to offer you coupons for the categories of the items that you buy most often. This is called "customer specific marketing."

Also, they can share your information with other companies, even the FBI. If you use those type cards, you might find that you are suddenly getting coupons in the mail for items that you have just begun buying.

The cards are used to monitor how often you come into the store. A friend of mine, not long ago, received poor customer service at a grocer's that requires loyalty cards be used to get lowered prices on featured items. After a 90 day hiatus from the chain, he received a coupon for $5 off his next purchase of any groceries on his next trip to shop.

It is obvious that the store had kept up with his frequency of shopping, realized that he had not been in recently, and sent him an incentive to return. He was suddenly introduced to Big Brother in the potato chip aisle.

My advice, if you have to get a loyalty card to get a discount on your purchases, do not use your real name when you sign up for the card. Stores in my area think that I am Jack Frost, Dylan Pumpkinhead, and Miles O'Miles-Ahead.

Only my son rides in my shopping cart, not Big Brother.