[spookybones]

My partner convinced me to use the Starbucks app for incentives. Unsurprisingly within months, the company doubled the points requirements for all rewards. I now have a dollar and change held hostage on it, but refuse to keep topping it up. I imagine there are many people in my situation.

[grues-dinner]

Once upon a time, 1 pence was one point (I don't recall which supermarket). Now you get 2 Nectar points per pound. I do remember my parents grumbling when it went to 1 point per two pence.

The supermarkets have gotten wise to people realising points and vouchers are scams that almost never pay out substantially and have instead started punishment pricing for people who don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.

[gruez]

>The supermarkets have gotten wise to people realising points and vouchers are scams that almost never pay out substantially for loyalty

It's called a "loyalty" program but there was hardly any "loyalty" to begin with. The points basically translate into a discount of <1%, and you get them whether you hop between stores for the best deal, or only shop at their place. The best way of thinking of them is a price discrimination scheme to rope in price-conscious shoppers.

>and have instead started punishment pricing for people who don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.

From a numeric perspective the two are identical.

[grues-dinner]

I often think of them as a tax on people who don't want to carefully tailor their shopping to line up with shifting "deals" across supermarket chains and over time and those who don't have enough storage-times-consumption to benefit from buy-n-get-one-free on kilo packs of margarine.

I don't think they are identical as such, because my impression is that points would not routinely exceed 5% of your overall shopping unless you got lucky or shopped very carefully, but these days "savings" from avoiding the punishment price regularly accounts for 5-10 pounds out of 100 pounds of shopping. Though maybe more people use the cards now to avoid it so it does average out.

[SpicyUme]

I might be using a dead person's account at several grocery stores. I just never updated the phone number I used, who knows what bucket my purchasing data goes into. But I hope it causes some inconsistency somewhere.

[grues-dinner]

I have opened several cards over time. I assume they also correlate with the payment card ID (and maybe facial recognition these days).

I also hope my use of random names and emails for captive portal logins is annoying someone somewhere. Tip for anyone looking: its rare you need to give a real email, because if you need to get on the WiFi, they can't really assume you can receive an email until you do.

At least, when I do see ads, they seem very untargeted generic to me so hopefully the algorithms are struggling to lock on!

[gruez]

>Unsurprisingly within months, the company doubled the points requirements for all rewards.

Surely that was a coincidence? The most I could find was grumblings about the program changing back in 2019[1], but so far as I can tell it stayed the same since then. I agree points devaluations are bad, but people aren't storing their life savings in them, and the "cost" of those points are basically zero, so I'm not sure what the hand-wringing over them is about.

[1] https://www.areweadultsyet.com/2019/03/19/maximizing-the-new...