Customer Rewards
Customer Rewards
[To the right Cueball stands in front of a sales desk, his shopping bag on the desk. Behind the desk on the left is a sales clerk wearing a peaked cap and typing on a cash register.] Sales clerk: That will be $23.03. Sales clerk: Also, I'll pay you 24 cents for your last name, 35 cents for a list of your family members, 79 cents for your cell number, and $1.20 if you hand me your phone and let me scroll through your Facebook posts.
[Caption below the panel:] Loyalty cards and rewards account offers get way weirder if you think of them as separate transactions.

Many supermarkets offer customers Loyalty programs that give discounts. To join one of these programs you often need to give various personal data, such as your name, or download an app that can access your Facebook account. The supermarket gets lots of valuable marketing data to target the customer in the future. They think this will make lots of money for them, so they entice people to do this. This is why it is able to offer a discount to members of the program.
Here, Cueball is at a store where the clerk is offering to give him benefits in exchange for data and to help them advertise their products. This comic imagines the exchange of data for a discount as the sales clerk offering cash at the point of sale, to emphasize how odd this exchange is. Not to mention, when flat-out asking to see someone's phone to write down their contact info and look at all their Facebook posts it sounds disturbingly like uncouth data harvesting, not too far removed from potential identity theft.
The title text continues this by considering how companies will also find ways to incentivize positive viral marketing or offer services in exchange for viewing adverts. By imagining these situations as if they were cash transactions makes them seem ridiculous.
All this information is used to send personalized ads which have a better chance of succeeding and earning money for the store owner.
[To the right Cueball stands in front of a sales desk, his shopping bag on the desk. Behind the desk on the left is a sales clerk wearing a peaked cap and typing on a cash register.] Sales clerk: That will be $23.03. Sales clerk: Also, I'll pay you 24 cents for your last name, 35 cents for a list of your family members, 79 cents for your cell number, and $1.20 if you hand me your phone and let me scroll through your Facebook posts.
[Caption below the panel:] Loyalty cards and rewards account offers get way weirder if you think of them as separate transactions.
