This afternoon, I used a gift card I'd been given to Cedarburg Coffee Roastery. I enjoyed my soy latte and fruit bar (I forget what it was called exactly, but it was pretty good) at a table near the register. Overhearing many transactions, I noticed something I hadn't paid much attention to before. They have a rather elaborate loyalty program in which the counter person looks up your name on their POS, which is rather intrusively positioned like a computer you would do office work on, rather than discreetly like at Alterra. In any case, one woman eagerly volunteered her last name--spelled out, even though it was something like "Thompson"--before she was even asked. These are all transactions for ten dollars or less.
Walking back to my car, I reflected in amusement at how conditioned we've become to provide such information for even petty transactions. Especially in the white, middle-class American milieu, we find Papiere vorzeigen! perfectly natural. And I do mean American: I don't think such programs would fly in Germany, ironically. And I do mean white, middle-class: I don't think such programs would fly in my old 'hood on 29th and Mitchell, either. ("Before we give you your $3 worth of food and drink, Senor, we'll just need some information for our, you know, database. What do you mean, will this result in a knock on your door at 5 a.m.?")
My objection lies not in the belief that there's anything sinister about this, but rather in the slow creep towards a system in which the buyer works for the seller rather than the other way around. The classic example would be the "Would you like to a buy a cookie for 99 cents?" at Walgreens. My objection here is that this a waste of the customer's time. There's a public outcry when WE Energies raises its rates by one-thousandth of a percent or whatever (I know--it's more than that), but all this private-sector crap adds up too, especially when it's a part of multiple transactions every day. Without going into how much I make--other than to say I'm not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination--minutes mean dollars. For others, I imagine that would only be more so.
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