You’re standing at the grocery checkout.
The cashier asks the same question they ask everyone:
“Do you have a rewards number?”
It sounds innocuous. But what they’re really saying is:
“Would you like to give us a little more of yourself in exchange for 40 cents off yogurt?”
Loyalty programs aren’t really about loyalty. They’re about data. Every swipe, every scanned banana, every impulsive pint of ice cream adds to a profile that says who you are — what you eat, when you shop, how predictable you’ve become. That profile gets sold, shared, and stitched together with a thousand others until your “discount” becomes part of someone else’s business model.
But there’s a loophole hiding in plain sight, and it comes with a melody attached:
867-5309.
Punch it in (with your local area code) when the register asks for a phone number, and nine times out of ten, the system happily applies the discount. Somewhere out there, an anonymous “Jenny” has been getting everyone’s grocery points for years — a shared ghost account passed from one privacy-conscious stranger to the next.
It’s a small act of rebellion.
You get the discount, but not the data trail.
You stay human in a system that wants you to be a customer ID.
And no, it’s not perfect. The real Jenny (or whoever owns that number now) has probably had her fill of weird coupons and mistaken calls. And, in some stores, they have blocked the number, so it won’t work. But the gesture matters. It’s a reminder that opting out — even symbolically — is still an option. That we don’t have to trade a little more of ourselves for every small convenience.
It’s a wink to everyone who still believes that privacy has value, even in the cereal aisle.
Jenny, if you’re out there:
thanks for taking one for the team.
By the way, this will be my last Thursday post for a while. I’m working on a lot of longer form content, so I’m going to be limiting my writing here to Tuesday posts for the foreseeable future!