Yet another frequent customer number...

Well in the last month, Albertson's stopped their data mining (er, frequent customer) program. For those readers outside the USA, it's a supermarket.

Frequent customer numbers and crappy little barcodes are not unique to the USA by any stretch of the imagination. In Uruguay I had my Tienda Inglesa, Devoto and Disco cards for their various point systems (powered by IBM) for little crappy prizes. (All are major supermarket chains.) Their cards didn't get you discounts (probably a legal thing) but you could in theory earn enough points to get actual merchandise - if you fed a family of eight for ten years or something.

It was with no sorrow that I took that little plastic Albertson's barcode off my key chain. They hadn't engineered it very well and the barcode number had worn off rendering it unreadable. The poor cashiers had to hand key it, not that I used them very much.

You could even enter it yourself at the self-checkout. There were many times (well, a couple) that store employees (when they were around) looked at me in shock as I pressed the little fruit and vegetables icon on the screen and then keyed in the numbers under the bar code. However, there REALLY were many times that there was not an employee in sight so you really have to know the quirks of those vicious non-robotic-appearing robots. If not operated with care those machines violate the first of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, namely "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

It's the INACTION part I take issue with. If the computer doesn't know the correct weight of the item or you even fart in the general direction of that innocuous looking carousel of plastic bags, you have to wait for the cashier. Why is this? That bagging area is a scale equally as sensitive as that owned by any coke dealer, just less obvious when you walk in.

Harm might be a stretch - but in 2007 America and especially in Scottsdale to wait is to experience emotional distress. And under some circumstances in the miraculous American legal system emotional distress is absolutely equal to harm.

But I've digressed.

In The Sound of Music the Mother Superior tells Maria (Julie Andrews) "When the lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window."

It's true. This week with the sudden revocation of my Albertson's card I had a setback in the race to see how many primary keys (<--- database joke for the non techies) I can collect before I die. There is one primary key I'd LOVE to lose but life chose to zap the supermarket one (this week at least).

The balance was restored however. I received a new one though moments ago via email. I appears I now have a Mr. S Leather customer number that I can use to get a discount. Please note that that link is not safe for... work, children, or those who have been "saved." So the upshot of all this is that my cucumber purchases are no longer tracked but my (wouldn't you like to fuckin' know) purchases ARE.