It does cost a bit more, but some of that is inherent because they generally carry stuff that is genuinely better. Despite that, some products are still very competitively priced, and the administrative and cognitive overhead of shopping there is significantly lower.
Thus far they've kept the large chain Orwellian dystopia entirely at bay. My shopping behavior doesn't make much of an individual difference to society but it's worth a premium to get a better product and to not feel like I'm contributing to The Great Race to the Bottom of Everything™ when I shop there.
Yes, it worked at a Safeway in San Jose too. I love that someone also had this stuck in their head and used it to sign up for grocery discounts.
Rendition of the song (bet you can't play it just once):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boaJCrHNRMA
Story of the song (along with a history of problems/facts about the phone number itself before and after the song hit):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny
The band:
For example if you rode the bus to the store and paid in cash then you'd have a low correlation coefficient.
The issue is most people (at least in the US) drive a car with a publicly registered license plate and use the same credit cards each time. And with things like facial recognition becoming more common it may be near impossible to hide who you are in the future.
Where is that info publicly available?
Most people are too lazy to get a PO Box and trust paperwork to hold their assets. LLCs work for this, also.
In my state, you just ask the DMV for it. For a yearly subscription fee, you can ask their servers.
Then used an account with a known online history, ie cookies not wiped etc, search engines and online retailers came back with prices for £100.
So in my limited experience, going to the lengths I did to hide one's identity online will cost you 4x -5x the typical price.
In some respects, these companies have also put a price on the value of online privacy, which is handy to have.
As someone who has had a limited input into supermarket clubcards in the UK, there is a lot of personal data that can be gained from this information even if the supermarkets dont go to the lengths they could.
I dont think people would be happy with what could be extrapolated, like working out how rich a family or shopper is, health conditions before they even get detected by medical experts, what religion they are, have they been made redundant. There is just so much meta data we give away, its quite shocking really.
In the wrong hands, people could carry out their own stealth agenda's. Back in the 90's people were injecting chemicals or tampering with food which prompted food companies to start using foil seals and other methods to ensure food tampering is/was spotted easily. Things like tampering with baby food and liquids.
It also gives the police and security services via court orders, a ready made dataset in order to build any case against you. Its bad enough people can be psychologically profiled using streaming services like Netflix or Amazon or Youview and satellite services connected to the net, but I dont think people value privacy personally and they dont understand how they can be manipulated once some information is known about them.
At the same time, the state has never had access to so much data in order to better target populations to control or manipulate for their own purposes, like we see with election manipulations that saw Brexit and Trump get into power. I saw some of those social media adverts and it was extreme psychological manipulation and even the BBC were involved with some of that data collection on social media.
In my experience, some criminals will operate over decades, cultivating scams especially when large sums of money like asset acquisition is involved.
I have used this across the country in random grocery stores and it has never failed me. I think I got this from some BBS text file...