Most grocery stores in my country have established an App (or card) you’re supposed to use and it’s slowly but surely going down the route of enshitification.
They start by letting you collect points. Then it’s extra savings. Eg regular price is 3€, sale price is 1.80€ but app users get it for 1.50€. Cool, a way to save some money, you might think. Nope. Once they reach a critical mass of app users it continues to sales being App-only so everyone is now forced to use the App but there’s no bonus left. Two of the biggest chains are at this stage. You now have the regular price (3€) and the app price (1.80€) which is the exact situation as before the app existed but they force you to jump through some extra hoops to get it.
Additionally to that they collect all this data with the sole purpose of manipulating you into spending more money at their store than you did before. They extract their profits from their customers and if we help them get more efficient at that it’ll be us that lose out.
Tl;dr: Fuck store apps.
tl;dr of the tl;dr: Fuck apps in general
They have done this even before everything was Appified, at least in the US. My local grocery store used to give out customized bar code key chains. They scanned the barcode when you started checking out to tie it to your account, and apply the discounts.
Now, my store’s app lets you build a list online, and when you tell it what store you are going to it sorts the list by aisle. I now use that exclusively. It saves me so much time. I find that useful, and worth the exchange of my tracked shopping habits.
However, I refuse to install their app on my phone, and interact with the list through their website. I feel there is just so much more tracking they can do with an app on your phone vs. a website login.
Don’t forget [dynamic pricing](Dynamic pricing is coming to grocery stores : NPR https://share.google/qVJDIXMPOU4F5gJ7u) coming soon to a store near you.
I will never install an app on my phone for a grocery store. I’ve stopped going to Kroger and Albertsons stores. Local coops for me.
For people that actually need to scan a loyalty card, I recommend Catima from F-Droid. Instead of having a bunch of proprietary spyware crap-apps, you have all your cards to scan in one place. No network permission needed.
For phone number loyalties, we are all Jenny (AC#)867-5309
