QFC Responds to Food Poisoning

This is their response to an hour and a half of puking, several hours of agonizing gastric pain, and -- in many ways -- more unpleasant sequellae: $20. At their store. On a traceable card.

I think I'd best donate this to a food bank or something.  

Advantage QFC Card

Up until a few months ago, QFC (Quality Food Centers) had been my preferred commercial supermarket. I like getting things at PCC or Trader Joes, but for the "regular" stuff, QFC did a nice job.

Fred Meyer bought them a year or so ago. Not much changed; they knew QFC's not the best price but better quality strategy. Kroger swallowed up Fred Meyer (and QFC in the process) and things started to get bad.

The employees are visibly glum. With QFC no longer a nimble local chain with a clear mission, they became nothing more than small cogs in a very big machine.

The final straw is the "QFC Advantage Card". They jack up the price on a few items unless you have a card to scan. Here's my card:

Note the hole for the keyring. They think of everything!

My friend Evan the weblog-less and I got together yesterday and the conversation turned to these cards. He's of the "I'll never shop there again" philosophy. Me? I still consider it better than Safeway or Albertson's. And I'd rather have fun than get angry, so I got to thinking about ways around the privacy problem....

• Lying. When Evan first complained to a manager at his local QFC, the manager suggested that he simply lie about his name, address phone, and other personal information. Evan found this interesting and now figures that if they don't mind him lying to them, they probably won't mind if he steals from them as well.
• Multiple Cards. A variant of the lying idea. This solution spreads my purchases out over many different cards.
• One Card per Trip. A variant of the Multiple Cards idea: show up at 5:00pm, get into the express line with four packs of gum (normally 3/$1.00, Advantage price: 4/$1.00). Get them to explain why you can't have the 4/$1.00 price a couple of times, then ask for an application and block the line as you fill it out very slowly.

All of these are fun ideas, but they don't quite accomplish what I'm looking for. Lying still gives them a complete profile of your habits. Multiple Cards gives them that same complete profile, but it takes them longer to compile it. College kids could have fun with One Card per Trip, but it would get old very quickly.

Then it hit me. The perfect solution. My card has bogus information, so no-one can trace it to me. The only useful information for them is my personal confluence of buying habits. Their inventory data already gives them aggregate buying habits. So the worst thing for them would be for me to allow my card to be used by other people. I can think of two ways to share my card with the world:

• Broadcast. Here it is:
  
  
  
  I suspect you can print that out and scan, scan, scan!
• Peer-to-Peer. Why not trade cards? I could get buttons printed up saying: Trade Advantage Cards with Me! I then find a willing partner and trade cards. I could start up a whole Where's George kind of thing here. What fun!

Of course, the REAL media won't support this, since QFC and it's corporate bretheren give them big bucks, but this idea can travel the back-roads of the blogiverse.

Ultimately, the stores could simply turn off the broadcast cards. They can't do anything about the peer-to-peer cards. Undetectable and untracable. Ultimately, it could pollute their data to worthlessness.

Their responses:

• Invalidate Broadcast Cards. They'd have to find them first.
• Require Valid Addresses. They could easily check 123 Donald Duck Way against the USPS Address Database. Not a huge problem, we could build a site that would generate random, but valid addresses.
• Require Valid Phone Numbers. Much tougher. I'll give my address out long before I'll share my phone number.
• Require Valid ID. Huge backfire potential. I wouldn't go near this with a 10-ft pole.
• And lots of other things that I can't think of right now....

Evan thought of a great solution: a pass card. A "loyal customer" card, as it were. A card with no bar code that he could flash to the cashier and get the same prices.

I have another suggestion: provide me with enough value to make relinquishing my personal information worthwhile.

Links:

• 10 Reasons Not to Use a Fake Card
• www.nocards.org