To add a little more context, I worked at a corporate marketing firm for 16 years, and I can see through their bullshit ulterior motives like a superpower.

The US is heading into a society where ALL corporations will have their own “loyalty” cards, which you present at time of payment for your discount, which actually serves to track your consumer habits (through being linked to your personal information like name, email address, phone number, physical address, etc).

Eventually, as this opt-in, privacy-invasive trend goes unregulated by our government (due to corporate infiltration of our government’s regulatory agencies, the term being “regulatory capture”. Learn this word, you will see it on your exam later.), what we see as advertised prices will begin to only apply to those with loyalty cards, the hidden meaning being that the sale price is contingent upon providing your private data. The corporations will pour millions into researching the smallest possible discount which will convince you to participate. Make no mistake, rest assured this is by design, the various industries have colluded, directly or indirectly, during this greedflation era to make it so financially difficult to exist, and have made us all so desperate to get by, we are everything but forced into their privacy disclosure program because we need every little bit that helps.

Goodbye privacy.

Say goodbye to the days of traditional, old-fashioned “here’s a sale, here’s the money” type of transaction. The buzzards in corporate finance department have found yet another incrementally more efficient way of extracting even more profit from you during the sale process. The era of loyalty cards/proprietary corporate apps is coming fast and hard, so get used to it because it won’t be going anywhere but further up your ass. I see these trends and this is ultimately why I left my corporate career. Once I saw it’s cold unquenchable heart of greed, I didn’t want to use my talent to further stoke the flames to revive the capitalistic greedfest that consumed the 80s. The only difference is that in the 80s, they lacked the technology, government policy, and the understanding of the socioeconomic mathematical models in order for the 1% to plunge us deeper into this hellscape we enjoy today.