www.romanvenable.net:  Clark's Weblog

Lot's of club cards, if retailers had their way. Let's see. There's the grocery store, Best Buy, Staples, Waldenbooks, Borders. And that's just to name a few. Each expects me to keep their card in my wallet so I can participate in their reward program (and they, in turn, can collect lots and lots of data on my shopping and spending habits). Do they think I carry a purse, or something?

I'd like a single item on which these different membership numbers can be stored. I say 'item' because it doesn't need to be a magnetic stripe card. In fact, there are some good reasons why it shouldn't be a magnetic stripe card. The trademark 'OneCard' is taken, but you get the picture.

We wouldn't have to trash the current system right away either. On the applications for current club cards, simply add a space for the unique ID number of the new system. Then, just use your identification 'item' when you check out. They still get their data and I have more room in my wallet.

One problem I can see right away is that merchants could pool data on a given consumer. This could be eliminated by generating a unique ID for the consumer to use with each merchant (and would thus require more than just an additional space). Only the company that manages the data would know which unique id's go with which consumer.

Categories: Ideas
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