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From: wouk@alumni.colorado.edu (Arthur Wouk)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,alt.privacy
Subject: Re: Safeway Stores to Accept Charge Cards
Message-ID: <1991Apr6.000027.462@colorado.edu>
Date: 6 Apr 91 00:00:27 GMT
References: <13810@asylum.SF.CA.US>
Sender: news@colorado.edu (The Daily Planet)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
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In article <13810@asylum.SF.CA.US> langz@asylum.SF.CA.US (Lang Zerner) writes:
>According to the San Francisco Chronicle, p. C1, April 4, 1991, the
>national Safeway supermarket chain will soon begin accepting Visa and
>MasterCard for purchases of groceries and other items.  The banks that
...
>business section :-).  The following sentence appears on the
>continuation page: "Suzanne McGrath, a supermarket-industry analyst at
>Piper Jaffrey in Portland [Oregon], suggested that banks may be
>subsidizing the cost of the new equipment in order to gain information
>on customer purchases that they could then sell to consumer goods
>companies."
>
>That's it.  There is no further discussion of the privacy infringement
>entailed by making personal information about an individual's spending
>habits available to third parties.
>

welcome to the twentieth century. i moved to colorado last year and
found that safeway has an organized data collection system going
called 'preferred customers'. you get a machine readable card which
you have run through the bar code reader for each shopping trip. they
collect information about what you buy, in exchange for which you get
freebies proportional to the amount you spend per month. (i usually
donate the freebies to the homeless here in boulder since we rarely
use the stuff.)

the only improvement over the present inventory control systems which
are widespread on bar-code reading systems is the ability to correlate
purchases over a period of time, thus correlating who buys item a with
who buys item b.  the information cannot be used about me, nor would
it pay safeway to sell the information to anyone else in any way that
would impact me unfavorably. i do not see food habits as forming a body
of knowledge which would inconvenience me if made available to other
food sellers not in competition with safeway. i am more annoyed with
the proliferation of mail-order operations for other goods.

if safeway goes over to vis nationwide, this may be because the
experiment here in colorado is too expensive, and emplying the banks
to produce the same information may be cheaper. also, it is easy to
avoid the whole system by NOT using visa. the world managed to sell
goods before visa, and no one is forced to use visa.
-- 
arthur wouk 
internet: wouk@cs.colorado.edu