Then today, my wife went through the self check-out and it printed out what appears to be a custom-generated advertisement for "New Morningstar Farms (R) Asian Veggie Patties! Introducing a sweet and spicy twist on traditional veggie burgers." This being North Carolina (pork-land, where "Asian-style vegetables and hints of chilis, garlic and ginger" aren't going to get a lot of folks' mouths watering) it's almost impossible to believe this isn't the first phase of some sort of creepy direct marketing campaign.
.................
One of the purposes of these 'loyalty cards' is to provide sellers with an enhanced database of sales activity. Should we (the store chain) continue to carry Grandpa Beryllium's Retro-styled Grape-like Liquid Composite? The sales figures - entered into the database at the checkout counter - will tell the tale.
Of course, raw sales data - that is, data with no relationship to the data object labeled 'buyer' (aka, credit card equipped talking monkeys such as you and me) input via the universal product scan swipe during checkout - provides the seller with sales figures and business intelligence metrics related to re-stocking, shelf position success and item popularity, among other variables.
Loyalty cards *enhance* this raw data by tying it to buyers. Demographic information can be gathered from addresses (for example, it's useful to determine that people living within zip code 90210, many of whom are shopping at your store, enjoy an average income that's very high by national standards); maps of customer clusters are created from this data. More finely tuned marketing campaigns can be created using this information.
The cards (or fobs or whatever instrument is used) are the sideshow: they're only ID input vectors which create a point of sale relationship between the items purchased and the buyer.
The database is the real show; the thing wherein the spatial temporal data of who buys, what they're buying and where they're coming from to buy is captured.
.d.
-- "I somehow doubt that 20 years of amphetamines and failure have changed you."
Dr. Impossible
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/