Rewards cards / loyalty card are designed to incentivize you to spend more with the stores. Ostensibly reselling data is a lot less valuable than directly trying to convince you to shop more at their establishments
That was true at the beginning of the loyalty card phage. But now the big chains are learning how to data mine and discovering the value of their data to others.
Now your loyalty card data is worth twice as much. Once to the retailer for internal marketing, targeting, purchasing, etc... and again selling it to outside parties.
thanks, sorry to reply to this late. I often wonder if I take a loyalty card and then for example I purchase twice as much double cream as the next person, does this get sold to health insurers who then charge me a higher premium? The permutations are endless eg too much beer. too many condoms. Too much spicy dip.
If you look at the history of the Tesco Clubcard (one of the early ones to appear in the UK), the data they mined from their new ability to tie purchasing trends to customers more than made up for the cost of the rewards being offered to get people to use it.
There's a reason they got so dominant over here - they were simply way ahead of the game on offering what their customers actually wanted, because they were the only people who actually had a clue.
If you read the Walgreens Rewards privacy policy, it covers everything from retail transactions to security camera footage and they are able to tie everything together. They're also able to gather and sell data about your health, which would otherwise be protected by regulation using the rewards program, especially as people are incentivized to use the card, even for prescriptions...and no one actually reads [between the lines] of the privacy policy
That's true and credit card companies are very open about it (at least if you read their reports for investors). The advantage of store cards is that the store knows exactly which products you bought, whereas they only know the total if you used a Mastercard/Visa.
>whereas they only know the total if you used a Mastercard/Visa
This is simply not true with respect to the big retailers in the US. This started as far back as '06, though the details of the implementation have changed a bit.
Only if it's a co-branded card. If you use your Visa issued by some bank to go shopping at Walmart, they won't get your personal details together with all items you bought. They can get the items but without the personal details (including age, wealth, etc), they're not that useful.
We had the ability to do this at the largest merchant acquirer 10 years ago as long as your bank signed up. Walmart was one of the first customers and would stream SKU-level data straight to our servers from the POS terminal.