| Supermarkets used to have coupons that you had to cut out of the paper to get discounts on certain items. That was already bullshit -- if you can sell it at that price, please sell it at that price! Why the extra hoop of cutting up a magazine first? Then supermarkets discovered bar codes. If you can convince people to carry around a barcode, suddenly you can track their usage patterns in exchange for a small discount. Okay fine, but at least it's anonymous, right? Then supermarkets realized they could get you to "activate" your barcode by going to a website. Hey, this way not only do we get their usage patterns, but we get data about them too! Demographics, etc. And people do it! Because of discounts. Sure, some of us give fake info, but plenty of people just give their real names, addresses, and emails. Fantastic. Well, lately I accidentally broke my barcode keychain thingy while locking up my bike (don't ask) and so next time I was in the supermarket I picked up a new one. Tried to activate it on my phone at the automatic cash but couldn't figure out how to log in to the site. Saw a link to the app but figured I'd look more into it later. So later, I did that.. and discovered you can't log in to the site, because you can only activate the barcode by installing the app! So, anyway, that's the story about when I gave up getting discounts at the supermarket. |