Welcome to Safeway. You know the scam: Safeway introduces a "club card" program, with the promise that club members get coupon discounts automatically. While they associate your purchasing habits, including store location, time of day, and products, with your name, address and phone number, you're swiping the card because you think you're getting good prices. Then later, after people stop using their cards due to privacy concerns, Safeway raises their prices such that a decent (not very good) price is the club price, and an extremely exorbitant price as the non-club price. Especially where Safeway has a locational monopoly (i.e. my neighborhood), they either make a killing or force the use of the cards.

Even being very familiar with this practice, it still surprised and appalled me to notice that two pounds of grapes that I purchased recently would have cost me $5.95 if I didn't use the card. With the card? $1.80. Safeway might call that a substantial savings, I call that a scam. Like, that's got to be illegal.

I'd get a new card with a fake name and address, but they're still getting value out of associating my purchases with my other purchases (across different receipts). And they'd get the exact same associations by using my debit card as an ident. Too many people use cash for groceries, I guess.