#176 Day of Enfamil

When I was writing about the supermarket cash register kicking out a surprising coupon recently I played with the idea that they knew something I didn’t. Namely, after I punched in my secret rewards card number at the end of purchasing a bunch of groceries, out came a coupon for a product that appeared to be unrelated to anything I had ever purchased. It was for Enfamil, an infant formula. Always seemed like a weird name to me. Like something between infidel and an Arabic surname. Habib, have Enfamil come over and bring us some goat milk. Or some harbinger of something else. Perhaps the infant formula coupon kicked out because one of my family members had recently bought an EPT test. The computer just connected its internal dots and, voila, this day shall live in Enfamil...
Assuming, for a moment, that these post-purchase point-of-sale coupons are not completely random, and are in fact related to previous purchases on the same secret number, is there an accessible data base that can report to whomever whether I’ve been using the grocery store to buy too much SudaFed, or perhaps a suspicious amount of fertilizer?
Sounds reasonable, I suppose, we don’t want any methed-up white supremacist terrorist tweaking out and blowing up the capitol. But perhaps the same software can determine whether I bought that new book by Bill Clinton. No problem again, you say. Dangerous liberal readings should be monitored. Ah. But suppose the powers-that-be change and we now have Hillary in the White House and that same software monitors how many Bill O’Reilly books you purchase.
Maybe someone decides to keep track of all the young bucks that buy big wheels and tires. Great, to send them a coupon on tailgate nets. But what if a potential Timothy McVeigh profile program kicks them out as a list of possible white terrorists? Tim’s truck had duellies, you know. Or, next time Granny Goodmuffin buys a “Save the Panda” air freshener, she gets dropped into the tree-spiking and hugging eco-terrorist subset?
Normally I’m content to go through life with a mild case of mono-noia, but things like this double my concern right up to paranoia in a second. People always think my objection to club and reward cards means I can’t accept change. Hey. Maybe I don’t like trading my freedom for a coupon. Maybe I just don’t like anyone keeping track of anything—and everything—I buy. Big Brother might be a lot more friendly when he’s wearing my local grocer’s apron. But I can still see his second row of shark teeth behind that greeter smile. “Sir, I understand you may need some infant formula...”
America ya gotta love it.