I’m not as clever as I thought.
It’s no secret that I hate grocery store “loyalty cards”. A chain will give discounts to it’s shoppers, but only if they sign up with all their most personal information. Then, the data provided is used in a number of privacy detracting sleazy ways.
Anyway, there’s a number of ways you could go about circumventing the system, although there’s no guarantee that they are completely legal.
Just off the top of my head, and not advocating anything, I suppose in theory you could:
Trade cards with friends
Use Rob’s bonus card swap page to generate a new barcode (does not seem to be working anymore, he used to serve up 5 or so random barcode pictures)
Mail away for the other Rob’s Safeway barcode sticker, and place it over your own.
Key in another person’s phone number at the checkout kiosk.
It’s that last method that seems to have given me the most mileage. You see, I have a number of coworkers who have home phone numbers were just a bit off from mine, and since I don’t call myself that often, I’d sometimes misdial at the kiosk. The funny thing was, it seemed to work every single time. (I thought I was being pretty slick.)
Someone tipped me off, and it wasn’t until I started making a number of dramatic misdial mistakes that I was sure it was working. And it does indeed work.
It seems that at the local DC area (and further) chain, Giant Food, you can key in any phone number, any number at all, and still get the discounts. I suspect that this is a kludge to allow a customer to receive the discount even before their application for a bonus card has been properly processed into the database.
So if you were to go through the auto-till self checkout thingy and key in a number, (say area code + a local exchange + a random number between 9800 and 9999 (which were traditionally reserved for payphones)), and that number was not in the database, the thingy would say, “your bonus card has been accepted” and then immediately say, “your bonus card was not recognized” and then of course, you would receive the current advertised discounts.
Simple as that. No tags to carry, no barcodes to scan, and the only skill needed would be having poor keypunching abilities.
Leah Says :
sadly, that doesn’t seem to work for Fred Meyer/Kroger. I had several times where keying in my phone number just never worked. Then again, their discount is some sort of shitty “we’ll mail you a dividend check if you spend more than XYZ here,” so I’ve never gotten it anyway. I honestly just got the card so I could get gas discounts, but there aren’t Fred Meyer gas stations here in MI.
For Safeway, I just use my parents’ phone number. So do my two brothers. I figure that our buying habits are different enough that we confound their data.
2006-10-09 14:40 PermalinkStandard Mischief Says :
Leah, thanks for the feedback.
I’ve tried the trick in Super-Fresh, another chain with the auto-till thingies, but it did not work there either.
Giant food (also called Super G) is in, according to their website, Maryland, Virginia, Washington (DC), and Delaware. There’s another Giant Food in Pennsylvania, and that one is also owned by the same parent company, but my barcode BonusCard never worked in that chain, so I guess my trick won’t work up there either.
I still use my parent’s phone number at Safeway too.
2006-10-09 15:20 Permalink