Criticism
Companies complain that these loyalty program discount goods to people that are buying their goods anyway, and that the expense of doing these programs rarely pays. Other critics see the lower prices and rewards as bribes to manipulate customer loyalty and purchasing decisions, or in the case of infrequent-spenders, a means of subsidizing frequent-spenders. Commercial use of the personal data collected as part of the programmes has the potential for abuse. It is highly likely that consumer purchases are tracked and analyzed towards more efficient marketing and advertising; in fact, this can be one of the purposes of the loyalty card. To some, participating in a loyalty program (even with a fake or anonymous card) funds activities that violate privacy. There has also been concern expressed regarding RFID technology being introduced to loyalty cards.
Loyalty and credit-card reward plans may be viewable as modern-day examples of a kickback. An employee who needs to buy something (such as a hotel room or an airline flight) for a business trip, but who has discretion to decide which airline or hotel chain to use, has an incentive to choose the payment method that provides the most credit card rewards or loyalty points, instead of minimizing cost for the organization.
Read more about this topic: Loyalty Program
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)