#175 Clue-pon

One of the advantages to grocery stores of all this club card business is that they can track your buying habits. The idea being, when it comes time to send you a special offer, they can send it just to you and not fifty thousand other people who have no use for such a thing. The national grocery chain is offered a big deal on certain products from Proctor and Gamble and then doesn’t have to gamble as much sending out the coupon or advertisement to the people who may want or need it. Which goes far towards explaining why not much of my personal junk mail includes ads for feminine hygiene products.
Of course, the other end of that seeming panacea is that mailing lists have accumulated all sorts of baggage over the years and my current household receives junkmail for myself and my wife, our three combined ex-spouses, my moved-out son, and various misspellings of our respective maiden, Christian, and patralineal names. I even get a reminder once a year to contribute to Safeplace under a feminized version of my first name. I make sure she contributes anyhow.
So, naturally, when Fred Meyer started doing their rewards card thing, I thought a similar onslaught of coupons would ensue. And, in fact, when the reward premiums eventually arrived in the mail many of the specials were for things we ordinarily bought. Which I have grown to appreciate. Nothing worse than being offered substantial savings on Ben and Jerrys when your doctor’s just put you on a low-fat, low-carb, low-anything-remotely-pleasurable diet.
Then I noticed something else. When I shop I don’t usually have my rewards card with me. But all you have to do is tell the clerk and she’ll let you punch in your phone number and it will credit it to your card. When the transaction is done, the receipt prints out and usually a couple of coupons spit out of the cash register at the same time. These are freestanding coupons too, not the kind that are on the back of the grocery receipt that you hesitate to use lest you need proof on the other side that you bought something that turned out to be defective. Lately, it’s seemed as if these coupons directly relate to what I buy or have bought recently. I got some Campbell’s Soup and, voila, Campbell’s soup coupons. I got some tuna and, abracadabra, tuna, mayonnaise, and bread coupons. The other day I punch in my number and at the end of the transaction out prints this coupon for Enfamil Infant Formula. Uh oh. So the first question in my mind wasn’t did I plug in the wrong number but: What does Fred Meyer know about my family that I don’t?
America ya gotta love it.