WHAT IS IT?
If you shop at any major grocery store chain, you’ve probably got one. Your key chain might even be crowded with them—two for the grocery stores you usually shop at, one for the drug store that services your prescriptions, another for the place you buy cat food . . . . They are your local shop’s reward to you for being such a loyal customer.
You hunt hungrily for the telltale yellow tags that mean savings. You fill your shopping cart with marked-down items and head home feeling smug about scamming the store out of thirty cents on the dollar. It is a deeply satisfying way to shop—a fact the grocery chains rely on to keep you using their discount cards.
As with so many of the little pleasures in life, the savings offered by discount cards are largely an illusion. Whether you use one or not, shopping at a grocery store running a discount card program probably costs you more money, not to mention some of your privacy. Somewhere, there is a database with a log of every purchase you’ve made using your card. It’s embarrassing enough to cruise through a checkout lane with nothing but Spam and macaroni and cheese in your cart; do you really want anyone to know how often you do that?