Why you shouldn’t have a OneCard
Or any Loyalty card, like Flybuys and AA Rewards.
This chick at my work, Mary, is soooo clued up on politics and the proverbial ass-fucking of people by marketers all around the world. And tonight at work we happened to get on the subject of loyalty cards.
Anyways, I always knew that these loyalty cards were bad, such as Foodtown and Woolworths OneCard but just because of the direct marketing, and them knowing what you buy. But as it turns out direct marketing has other implications.
So, say the analysts analyze the data of what people buy using loyalty cards, and they find that Watties spaghetti sells better than OAK spaghetti. The retailers begin stocking more Watties and putting them in a more prominent position on the shelf so they sell even better. Then they’re like, well we can afford to raise the price on that since we know people will buy it anyway.
So then you, the customer, are suddenly paying more for the Watties product. Whats more, as the OAK product are put on less and less prominent shelf positions, and less stock is on the shelves, less stock is sold.
So OAK eventually disappears from the shelves. Therefore minimizing your choice of products when you go to the supermarket.
What happens next, is a little scary. The supermarkets bring out their own brand (such as Signature Range), and go to the dominant product maker (Watties) and say “Hey, make us spaghetti to sell as our own brand or we will stop stocking your product.”
So you get a situation like what has already happened. Watties make both their own spaghetti, and the Signature Range spaghetti. That’s right, both products are exactly the same. One is expensive, one is a little less expensive. Of course Signature Range is never going to disappear from the shelves as long as the brand is owned by Progressive Enterprises (Foodtown+Woolworths).
You may not think this is a big issue. It’s just spaghetti. But with the advent of Flybuys and AA Rewards, everything from insurance to electronics could be affected by this. This gives you the consumer less choice, and is quite a passive anti-competitive practice.
It’s all to stop you from getting a bargain, and make the big companies richer.
I made a little flow chart to help those of you who are more visually appeased.
