Shopper's Club Savings and its Historical Political Implications
by Matt LeBlanc

Are you aware that the supermarket you frequent quite possibly knows everything you have bought for the last couple years?

Yup.

Disturbing, huh? We are a society that has been brought up with a willingness to spend, but a desire to save. This is how your local supermarket (kind of an oxymoron, huh? LOCAL SUPERmarket) has gotten you to sign up for the savings card. Ya, you know what I am talking about. The little card you slide through or wave over at check-out for that every important 12 cents worth of savings. Some stores give you a generic piece of plastic with their logo on it, the real nice ones even take the time and money to personalise the card and put your name on it. If you are a patron of one of these stores,congratulations. You've picked a real classy establishment.

I'll tell you, these cards are wonderful, on an average purchase of 100 dollars at a supermarket, the club saving cards, or whatever your store calls them, saves you an average 7 dollars and 23 cents. You're not saving that much? Well, I guess your just not purchasing the right products.

John Adams, our country's most important patriot and finest president, wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1816 "it's healthy to believe, but honest to suspect." Apply this saying to your local supermarket. When you signed up for those "exclusive" club savings you also signed away your shopping privacy. Did you buy two frozen dinners, ice cream, and two heads of lettuce for the price of one with your club card yesterday? That is now in the stores files and all the demographic information you gave to the store when you signed up is being passed along to all those companies.

Did you get a pair of pants dry cleaned, rent three movies, buy dog food, and get thirty cents off your film development with your shopper savings card? Well, companies around the globe and people you have never met just got your shopping list for the day. Did you pick up a bottle of your stores version of Tylenol at a 10 percent discount with your exclusive shopper card along with a prescription for Viagra? Think this was private business between you and your supermarket's pharmacy? Or maybe you have a club savings card at your drug store. Well, the whole corporation that owns your supermarket knows that you have an erectial disorder, as does every single drug conglomorate and advertiser world-wide.

Nice, eh?

By siging up for club card savings you also sign away your privacy for all the shopping you do at that store. Supermarkets continue to expand, offering more and more ammentites all the time including dry cleaning, photo development, pet stores, video rentals, restaurants, banks, pharmacies, and clothing sections. Department stores and groceries are morphing, and soon you will be able to get anything you need at one stop. Probalby all through a drive through. Scary, huh? You know what's even scarier, the store will be tracking everything you buy, and letting the world know about it.