The other day, I was picking up a few odds and ends at Safeway (which is pretty much all I ever pick up there), and with my receipt they gave me what I assumed to be a coupon. Typically, I enjoy reading the coupons because it always amuses me to see how Safeway can gather so much data about me being vegan, yet all of their recommendations are slightly off. If I buy an Amy’s No-Cheese Pizza (yes, I know it’s ridiculous to pay so much for something so simple), the coupon will invariably suggest next time I get a DiGiorno Four-Cheese Pizza. So, I always toss the coupon in my backpack to enjoy when I unpack it at home.

As it turns out, it was NOT a coupon, but a notice about a new program they are offering whereby all of my club card purchases are tracked and you can look at the raw data on the Safeway website. So, I enroll online to check it out and it’s sort of interesting to see how it parses my purchases.

There is zero cholesterol (no shock there), low fat, and I’m WAY off the charts for fiber, sodium, and carbs. Pretty much what I’d expect.

There are two flaws in the system, though. One is that most of my food isn’t purchased at Safeway, but at Rainbow Grocery, so I’m not getting an accurate picture of my diet from this data. In fact, there are very specific things I regularly buy at Safeway for existing recipes, and not much else. This would be great for someone like my family back home, though, who tend to do 98 percent of their shopping at one store.

The other problem is not unique to Safeway or this program, but online information in general. For example, whenever I buy a birthday gift for my nephew on Amazon, for the next few weeks, I will be told that people who bought the Doodlebops DVD also tend to like the Wiggles, and I’ll get occasional e-mails alerting me to things other Doodlebop purchasers are also interested in. Sure, you can be conscientious and tag all of your gift purchases as gifts, and I believe there is also a way to go in and edit your purchases along these lines, but even I never found enough free time to bother with that. So, I have been at Safeway before and bought gross things for people staying with me (like milk), or swiped my card for the airline points when a group of drunk queens wanted food at three in the morning, all of which is food I never consume. But overall, if the majority of my personal shopping happened at Safeway, this would be interesting data.

That said, I think it is interesting to show people information like this because it doesn’t lie. I often joke with my grandmother who, whenever we discuss eating less meat, mentions that she would but she already has so much frozen meat in her freezer. I keep asking her to tell the person that does her shopping that she doesn’t want them to keep buying all that meat, but of course, she buys it all herself.

I think it would be interesting for someone to take cholesterol pills and see that their grocery purchases are 40 percent cholesterol. Everyone’s different, so that could be a lightbulb moment for some people. Of course, the people who don’t worry about nutritional information… well, they wouldn’t sign up to get these reports anyway.

I realize there’s a big brother aspect here, which is something that has always existed with these cards. So, for me, this is the first good example of mining that data to benefit the consumer.

It won’t shift me over to making the majority of my purchases at Safeway, but I think it’s a great example of giving consumers important health and nutritional information. Good stuff…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 11:13 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.