Where's My Reward?
Flagpole Magazine, June 2003
By William Dylan Powell

I lose everything. Books. Bills. Business cards. Thank God nobody ever asked me to hang onto a wedding ring until the ceremony or get a liver to the hospital in time for a transplant. Just keeping track of the single W-2 form I get each year has become an extreme sport. So what happened yesterday was no surprise.

Grabbing my keys and a $10 bill from the nightstand, I hit the neighborhood grocery store to buy some tea. Let's call the store Roger's. When I got to the checkout, the clerk asked if I'd brought my Roger's Card, a card customers sign up for to get the best prices the store has to offer.

I, of course, had lost mine.

According to the clerk, I had two options: sign up for another card or pay the higher price - 40 percent higher than if my card were handy. I would've taken my business elsewhere, but elsewhere also has a Roger's-like card program. And so I was sentenced to either pay a fine for my commercial non-conformity or serve time filling out paperwork for a new card.

I paid the extra buck because I was in a hurry. And while it was only a buck, it was my buck. Prior to the Roger's Card, I'd have paid the lower price anyway. Now I basically have to become a Roger's employee to eat and drink economically. If this is really a customer reward program, where's my reward?

This may seem trivial. But feeding your family is one of Man's most basic concerns. And food retail practices in the United States have become more predatory with advances in technology, market research and business process engineering. Today, few consumers question where their food comes from or the terms under which they purchase it. And food marketers have flourished in this ignorant consumer environment, while the increasing pace of life and proliferating culture of hyper-consumerism has kept us from paying attention to the men behind the curtain.

Grocery shoppers don't save money using discount cards. Prior to implementing card programs, stores raise their prices across the board. Therein lies the apocryphal discount. If the shelf price for a bottle of table wine is $14.99, and your card price is $11.99, the shelf price at stores with no card program is typically $11.99 anyway. Fortunately for Roger's there aren't many stores that don't play this shell game.

Most people imagine that Roger's takes the information from these cards and turns it into fodder for direct marketing. Wrong. The real value is for the stores to use their marketing mafia to develop profiles of the most lucrative customers. The entire enterprise can then cater to these juiciest segments.

Eventually, the price I pay for everything at Roger's will be spending-based. Patrons who are less profitable - like my two-person family with modest spending habits - will pay higher prices so the store can aggregate its discount power across the more profitable segments. This sets a dangerous precedent when you follow its logical conclusion: only the most profitable households having affordable access to food and drink.

While stores like Roger's are usually prohibited from selling my name and address to other marketers, it's only a matter of time before retail industry lobbyists buy this access for their clients. As it is, law enforcement agencies are free to call upon this information whenever it suits them. Who knows, someday my health insurance provider may decide to review my caffeine intake and raise my rates due to increased risk factors associated with too much tea or wine.

American workers are glorious earners, but we're lousy consumers. We forget that since we're the ones spending, we have control. Instead, we simply pay what's on the price tag and keep our mouths shut. The tragedy is that if shoppers simply stopped participating in these programs, they would disappear. Personally, I'm tired of furnishing the summer home of a Roger's executive with my grocery budget.

In his essay "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau noted that: "all men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its efficiency are great and unendurable." This time it's not the government, but our own consumer complacency exerting its tyranny. And like the rebellious colonial tea drinkers of Thoreau's Massachusetts, I also feel entitled to buy tea without losing my shirt.

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