Loyalty Programs: From Punch Cards to Panopticon

Loyalty programs used to be simple and mostly private. You might have carried a punch card from your favorite coffee shop or sandwich place. Ten punches and your next item was free. Or maybe you collected something bigger, like Canadian Tire Money from a chain of stores, or S&H Green Stamps that worked across many businesses. These programs stayed on paper, stayed straightforward, and rewarded your repeat business without asking for much personal information. That started to change in the mid-1990s. Paper rewards gave way to plastic "club cards" at grocery stores and other chains. Those cards soon connected to apps, and eventually the programs themselves became stand-alone profit centers for big companies. Along the way, the personal data they collected went from almost nothing to deeply invasive. That data could be combined with information from other sources to build rich profiles of individual shoppers. In this post, we will look at how that shift happened and what it means for us…