Aisle say - Know-it-all grocery cart may be in shoppers' future

WASHINGTON -- You swipe your savings card against a screen mounted on a supermarket shopping cart. As you move about the store, the screen flashes ads for products you usually buy, notes that you haven't bought toothpaste in six months and provides recipes and health information.

All the while, your every move -- including which aisles you go down and how long you spend in each department -- is tracked for marketing purposes via the savings cards, known as loyalty cards. Such technology is in the works and privacy advocates -- already concerned about the proliferation of cards that monitor customers' purchases -- are outraged.

Carl Messineo, co-founder of Partnership for Civil Justice, called the technology "visual pollution" that "if forced upon me, I probably would sooner starve."

Klever Marketing, based in Salt Lake City, plans to provide the screens to supermarkets at no charge as early as this summer.

The Klever-Kart cannot identify customers by name or connect them with their shopping profiles. But company spokeswoman Pam Geiger said Klever planned to develop a special card to use in conjunction with the Klever-Kart, making it possible to identify shoppers and provide them with personalized data.

Hard to resist

Even without the high-tech screens, loyalty card programs proliferate around the country. Seven of the top 10 American supermarket companies have them, as do CVS and other drug chains.

Supermarkets say the cards improve efficiency and save consumers money. Typically, stores charge cardholders less than the shelf price for many items, making signing up for one hard to resist.

But to critics, the cards are merely marketing gimmicks that force people to exchange personal information for savings that may not even exist.

The cards track products and brands customers buy, where and when they shop and how much they spend.

Knowing consumers' shopping habits, grocers can identify their best customers, design target advertising and coupon campaigns, and make stores more convenient -- with the goal of keeping big spenders coming back. "When you're carrying around a Safeway card, you feel like you're part of the Safeway community," said Arthur Middleton Hughes, vice president for business development of CSC Advanced Database Solutions, a database-building company in Schaumburg, Ill.

'A gold mine'

Hughes said card customers shop more than people who do not have the cards, but supermarkets do not have the time or money to analyze most of the data they collect. "That's too bad because it's a gold mine of information," he said. Some shoppers aren't impressed by the technology.

John Vanderlippe of Nashville, Ind., refuses to shop at the Kroger, Marsh or Mr. D's stores. Instead, he drives up to an hour in the opposite direction of his home to go grocery shopping, often buying two or three weeks of food at once.

"I'll do just about anything to avoid going to some place that has the cards," said Vanderlippe, 38. "We all have to eat, and to have somebody track those purchases is offensive."