I decided a long time ago that the hassle and privacy issues of those loyalty schemes do not make being a member worthwhile.
Yeah there was that thing a few years back by maybe Consumer NZ or someone like that, that showed the average savings were around 0.75%. And you can still get those savings with cuntdown.co.nz for countdown/woolworths and the one linked above pooworld.co.nz.
So I've stopped as well. Fewer cards in my wallet and no need to have their apps installed.
I'm tempted to sign up for one of these under a pseudonym. Do you think anyone would notice that Heywood Jablome had joined their scheme.
They probably wouldn't care! The spending patterns will be valuable regardless of the name. That's what's so cool about the websites, it just generates random valid memberships that I assume assign the purchases to random people (or cards that haven't been activated yet).
In case it gets taken down in the future, here's how it works - https://web.archive.org/web/20250220103424/https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1apis6y/comment/kqb8yos/
Interesting! I once wrote an excel macro that used checksums to validate bank accounts, and I cannot remember anything about them except that it was just maths. So I'm guessing the websites just use this format as described in your link.
In your link they are speculating about invalid numbers. If they still have stacks of them in the shops to hand out to people who would want to use them right away, I doubt they would reject an unregistered card. Just record it the same way as any card but only allow points or whatever to be spent when it's been registered.
I've used the cuntdown site a lot and can only remember one time the barcode was rejected.
I haven’t used it heaps but it has never failed for me so far.
I think you’re right about the pre-populated codes. I don’t think they do user verification at runtime. That would hurt the self-checkout experience even more - their app is already painfully slow. But as the author said, stupid decisions have been made.
Has also been covered in The Detail recently. Worth a listen.
The high price of loyalty: https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2019040787/the-high-price-of-loyalty
The duopoly supermarkets in NZ never cease to amaze me. Every year is a new low.
"You're not the customer; you're the product."
Yay! Cuntdown and ~~unusedworld~~ pooworld are back!
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