[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.