In order for a business to succeed in the competitive market, the business has to stay innovative by creating knew ideas and new ways to keep their customers happy and get the attention of new shoppers so they could keep coming back. One of the newest ideas in the supermarket chains are shopping cards. The cards are design to fit each costumers needs. Shopping or loyalty cards are a way for businesses to identify and reward specific customers. The card allows the store to monitor buying habits of each customer. They can also be used to adjust prices at the cash register. By recording the type of merchandise that the card holder purchase they are able to advertise and even reward the customers in an individual basis. Shopping cards were design to reward the loyal customers. Although these shopping cards seem to so many great advantages many people still against the entire shopping card idea. Their negative view of these cards derives from easy access that these companies have to customer information. People feel that a business monitoring what they buy is a great invasion of privacy. This along with other negative aspects of shopping cards is the reason why many people including are against the use of shopping cards. Shopping cards do far more harm then they do well.
Still the shopping cards do serve a purpose. The customers, who businesses feel are the most loyal, are the ones who have been doing businesses with them for many years and will always come back. According to research by Frederick Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, said that "keeping just 5 percent more customers increase the lifetime value of each customer by up to 100 percent. This is because new customers are costly customers. You have to lure them with advertising, and once they're in the door, they need more help. Software buyers, for example, call the help desk more in the first 60 days than they do in the next 60 months.
