Surely that was a coincidence? The most I could find was grumblings about the program changing back in 2019[1], but so far as I can tell it stayed the same since then. I agree points devaluations are bad, but people aren't storing their life savings in them, and the "cost" of those points are basically zero, so I'm not sure what the hand-wringing over them is about.

[1] https://www.areweadultsyet.com/2019/03/19/maximizing-the-new...

The supermarkets have gotten wise to people realising points and vouchers are scams that almost never pay out substantially and have instead started punishment pricing for people who don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.

It's called a "loyalty" program but there was hardly any "loyalty" to begin with. The points basically translate into a discount of <1%, and you get them whether you hop between stores for the best deal, or only shop at their place. The best way of thinking of them is a price discrimination scheme to rope in price-conscious shoppers.

>and have instead started punishment pricing for people who don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.

From a numeric perspective the two are identical.

I don't think they are identical as such, because my impression is that points would not routinely exceed 5% of your overall shopping unless you got lucky or shopped very carefully, but these days "savings" from avoiding the punishment price regularly accounts for 5-10 pounds out of 100 pounds of shopping. Though maybe more people use the cards now to avoid it so it does average out.

I also hope my use of random names and emails for captive portal logins is annoying someone somewhere. Tip for anyone looking: its rare you need to give a real email, because if you need to get on the WiFi, they can't really assume you can receive an email until you do.

At least, when I do see ads, they seem very untargeted generic to me so hopefully the algorithms are struggling to lock on!