--- Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
[WS:] Perhaps, but all that information can be obtained from census data at a much lower cost. Demographic and income data can easily forceast what type of people will be visiting the store and what they will be buying. So I do not see much advantage from collecting essentially similar kind of information through loylaty cards at a much higher cost.
In short, I do not think that such cards can deliver much more useful information than it is already availble from public databases. In my view, they are what they name suggests "loyalty cards" i.e. marketing gimmicks to tie people to a particular store.
The problem - endemic to the market system in general - is that cards work if only some stores have them and others do not. In that situation the card issuing store has an advantage over the one that does not issue them. However, under the market system vendors tend to ape each other, so after a while everyone issues similar cards, which become useless because they do not offer any advantages anymore, but nobody can really give them up on the pain of putting oneself in a less competitive position.
In other words, loyalty cards are a testimony to the irrationality of the market system - they do not offer any advantages anymore, but nobody is in a position to discontinue them either. So everyone is forced to jump throughthis hoop and waste resources as a result.
Wojtek
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