- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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The same goes for customer loyalty cards. All market tracking schemes should be rightfully banned.
What ticks my off is that I have the stupid Safeway card and the stupid Kroger card. But now there’s more deals, better deals if I do a digital coupon requiring the app on my phone, too. It’s not enough to know about all the regular items in my home, from celery to toilet paper, but they also must need to hoover up all my digital into as well? Dude, just buy it from Meta or whichever jerks have it all. Half-price grapes ain’t the right price.
Yeah multiple layers of s***; I’ll be honest I never figured out how to use the digital coupons for the second layer of discount; seems like it’s not in the Kroger app but some other scammy telemetry scamming 3rs party. I paid the $2.99 for the ice cream I stead of 1.99
At least you can not only ask other customers for their cards, but also sometimes be offered theirs without even asking.
Man, I hate when people like you come out with “justifications” like these.
No. They should be banned. Trying to “justify” their existence with “well umm, sometimes you can just talk to other customers for theirs!” is fucking stupid.
Why are we so eager to do the work of our oppressors for them?
I don’t see a “justification” in my reply. I cannot change or influence the system, I need the discounts - so I do that.
I’m in California where we have a grocery chain, Safeway. They’ve had a loyalty card for decades, which works great, gets you good deals, can be scanned by the checkout clerk or at self checkout. It also racks up points which can be used for discounts.
About 2 years ago I started seeing signs in the store offering even greater savings through the app. There will sometimes be 2 signs side by side for the loyalty card vs the app. The app is always a better deal.
So I downloaded the app and learned
- the app cannot scan your membership at self checkout, you have to be checked out by a clerk
- the app’s membership number is different from your loyalty card number and the two cannot be merged.
- because of that your points can’t be transferred to the app
It’s the dumbest thing ever. Why not just offer the better savings to the loyalty card? Isn’t that the whole point behind loyalty? I literally shop at Safeway less often now.
“It’s the dumbest thing ever. Why not just offer the better savings to the loyalty card?”
it’s not a flaw. it’s a feature.
Food Lion (East coast, not sure if they’re national) has a fairly good loyalty program. Your loyalty card number on the physical card or in the app are the same, you can load coupons to it so they’re applied at checkout if they’re relevant, you can use their ordinary website if you don’t have/want to use a smart phone app…it’s non-cancerous.
Loyalty cards werent a great thing either.
They werent to reward your loyalty, they were to tie your purchase history to an individual, So that information can be used and sold for marketing purposes.
It was basically the prototype for the invasive, information stealing apps we have today.
Can’t your purchases be tied to you via credit/debit card number? I mean obviously you can use cash, but I don’t see a lot of people using cash
yes, that still doesnt give the store your home address, phone number, etc etc like signing up for a rewards card does.
Does the supermarket sell the data, or use it for their own purposes
yes
My GF laughs because I have no loyalty cards or apps and I laugh that she has one for everything.
Loyalty rewards are bullshit.
In the US, if you don’t have the loyalty card, you’re paying more for groceries. For the stores we use, any sale prices are contingent upon using the loyalty card. This can add up to $5-$10 per order.
I use a loyalty card pretty often. It’s just that it is almost always another customer’s card) And in case this is not available - a barcode of some rando’s loyalty card I found online, the valid ones are often easy to find.
(Local Area Code)-867-5309
Works every time.
We used to be free from such bullshit, but some companies have started trying to bring similar systems here in Brazil, especially drugstore brands that would ask for our id number in every order to give “discounts”. Fortunately, this practice is now being investigated, and I hope the companies lose the case.
Yep, the homeless pay more!
Remember the meltdown over “Obamaphones”?
Early 2000 wants its internet back
Eh. The internet was always shit because of scammers and useful idiots.
Really the only way to make it not-shit is to have governments step in and protect us from what useful idiots have been conditioned to accept as normal.
Governments only serve rich people though, so we’re SOL.
It’s a cultural problem.
I am still using a flip phone. My new goal is to make it to 2027 marking two decades of rejecting the smartphone era. Each time I consider compromising something gets even more awful about smartphones and I double down on saying no.
Don’t lose hope, lead the resistance!
Out of curiosity, how many flip phones have you used since 2007?
Out of curiosity, how many flip phones have you used since 2007?
My current phone is a flip phone. A Samsung Galaxy Flip 5
Well, you’re technically correct lol
I hope you can see that, as an owner of a Android flip phone, it is annoying to see people use “flip phone” as a synonym for “dumb phone”. BTW not all dumb phones were flip phones, only the final wave of dumb phones generally were.
@btaf45 @nossaquesapao thank god someone had pointed this out because I’m old and I’ve been getting confused. Nokia 3310 all the way
As best as I can remember, I’m on my 6th.
Well… I expected better longevity, to be honest.
If you don’t have a smart phone in the US, even temporally, your almost a second class citizen.
Then if you don’t install corporate apps on your phone, there are even more problems for you.
You can still live in the US without apps… For now
I remember this being true almost as soon as smart phones and QR codes were invented. There were so many things you just couldn’t do as easily if you didn’t have one. Even in 2006.
also those who dont want to install that spyware shit on their phones. Even if you dont care about the data collection it still consumes battery faster as more and more data is being transferred
McDonald’s (in Germany at least) needs your location to “see when you arrive at the restaurant”. What the hell?! That doesn’t even work properly and they force it on me! I uninstalled the app and now I am actually happy, because without the promotion and discount stuff, I don’t eat McDanks that often anymore.
I use an app for OTR (petrol chain in Aus) and they’ve removed the requirement for location which is… Unexpected, to say the least. Anything except using the pumps on the app no longer needs it when all orders previously needed it.
Thats actually pretty nice. And on the subject of cars: I don’t get why (some) people with E-Cars say they are so much “greener” and then use like 10 different apps for the car, recharging, etc. Those servers produce so much, really, so god damn much CO2… (Not saying combustion engines are better, but…)
My Kia Sportage PHEV came with a “Kia Connect” app. There is a monthly charge but I get first 3 years for free. It’s got some sort of useful things but I don’t really use it much anymore. More likely than not I won’t bother to pay for it when the free years are up.
Understandable. In Germany it isn’t customary to have an AC, but I got one. It’s from Mitsubishi and has some cloud remote control app thing. I mean, ok, controlling the temperature from not home is maybe useful, but I haven’t and will never use it. I just set the Temperature and go on Auto mode…
Yeah, I couldn’t be arsed to install that shit. I’m also not taking out my phone for this kind of bullshit. I’m sick and tired of smartphones.
It’s also a gigantic information harvesting ploy.
The whole using your phone for everything from grocery shopping to just doing whatever Like getting deals or whatever?, Can it please go away?
They’re collecting our data anyways.
For some things it’s more convenient for customers. For others, it’s more convenient for businesses.
We, as customers, need to promote what’s convenient for us while ignoring what’s convenient for businesses.
Keep in mind: we are not on the same side as the people taking our money.
Even the homeless in my city have smartphones.
Even if I was willing to download all of those apps I don’t have room for them. They chew up 50-300mb each (why!?) and if I installed all of them I’d run out of memory. Since most phones now don’t support memory expansion I have to be picky about which ones I use.
I have THREE separate parking apps because I travel.
most phones now don’t support memory expansion
Well of course not. If phones supported memory expansion you would just buy more memory, instead of buying an entirely new phone Don’t even get me started on how bloated these apps have become. I used Paperclip word processor on a Commodore-64; you can not convince me that your app needs to be 50+ Megs in size.
You can’t compare (what is arguably) the peak of human computing to modern phones.
…I miss the c64
Edit: fixed pique to peak. Sorry. Autocorrect got me again
And that’s one of the benefits from open source apps. I have a very low end and dated phone, and yet I have more apps installed and hardware functionality than the average person, because I grab everything I can from f-droid. It’s amazing how much smaller and performant everything is.
Have you looked at Obtainium? It pulls apps directly from their release page, or f-droid repos.
I see people mentioning obtainium, but never tried it. Will it give some relevant benefits over fdroid for low end devices?
No benefits regarding performance. But you get faster updates and more apps than on f-droid.
The reason they’re so huge is
- They’re generally not well optimized by the creators.
- They all contain their own dependencies
- There’s a LOT of stuff in them (both code and dependencies). Which is kind of an optimization problem, but potato potato.
Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.
Same thing with rendering/layout/functionality frameworks. And each app has their own.
My favorite Android app, Trail Sense, which has the ability to know when sunrise and sunset are without Internet, is like 10MB
Not having a phone really sucks in this day and age. Imagine getting out of jail for something stupid like marijuana possession and then a parole violation due to a missed appointment. No one will hire you with your rap sheet. You live in a halfway house with a bunch of petty BS every day. And you can’t keep up with your parole demands because of how much your lack of a phone gets in your way. At the end of the day, there IS a way to succeed if you make the right choices, but shit, it’s just so much harder for some people to make the right choices when every day is crisis mode. And all because of WHAT?
I am still on a flip phone. It is usually silent, and I don’t spend much time with it at all. While I am missing out on discounts and such, I simply hate the idea of constantly using a phone. Email is my telecommunication of choice, but receptionists don’t understand the idea, unfortunately.
My household bought a Rinnai water heater, and the bastard needed a phone to set the temperature. Thing is, it couldn’t communicate with the two or three phones that were used on it. Fortunately, there was an old-school modification for a physical keypad, but that had to be bought separately.
Phones are just not my thing.
I used a flip phone for a month to help curb my screen time addiction. The number of restaurants, stores, etc. that simply expect it of you to have a smart phone was eye opening.
Have you tried… self-control?
Smartphones are objectively better than flip phones.
The flip phone praise comes from useful idiots looking up to children who lack self-control.
It’s all bass-ackwards, but that’s how far we’ve strayed from the truth.
The powers that be are happy, though. We’re just not one of them.
Any time I’m required to use an app for something that could be a website, I leave the app a one star review.
I keep seeing this headline and thinking it’s a slur
