When the shopper in front of me at a store till was asked whether she had a loyalty card, she said that, unfortunately, she didn’t. I joked that she could borrow mine. When she came to pay, she offered to load the points she’d have earned on to my card. Would it have been ethical to accept?
It would have been unethical to accept in that a loyalty card is a store’s inducement to shoppers to sign up to its bonus scheme for regular customers and, thereby, drum up repeat business (“bonus scheme for regular customers” being technical retailing jargon for “giving customers a £10 voucher, which they can use only for buying even more goods from us, providing they first spend a sum in our stores equivalent to Cher’s annual cosmetic surgery bills”).
Loyalty points should be no more transferable to a fellow shopper than a London Underground one-day travel card is transferable to another would-be Tube passenger once you happen to have completed all your planned journeys for the day: yes, in theory, you could have made all those additional Tube journeys yourself. But the travel discount is an inducement for the specific purchaser of the travel card, as a ploy to swell overall ticket sales.
On the other hand, you might well think that it is the moral duty of each of us to confuse the nosey statisticians who exploit details of our shopping preferences stored in loyalty cards to glean useful information about us very cheaply. Your loyalty cards now contain enough information about what you’ve been buying and doing to blackmail you. If you really must a have a loyalty card, swap it with others in the till queue so that the shop’s statisticians are foxed by customers who seem to have no logical pattern of purchases from one week to the next.
FACING A DILEMMA
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Have you a dilemma of your own? Write to Modern Morals, Times Features, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. E-mail: modernmorals@thetimes.co.uk