the number of places that beg me to install an app is ridiculous. if i installed an app from every single place that begs me to my phone would probably shut down in protest from the thousands of apps i’d have cluttered everywhere.
from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.
just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.
honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.
Yes, it's exhausting. I mean I get it, having higher prices for people without the app is the same as member cards with swingeing prices for non-members. It's a surcharge on the unaware (including non-native speakers, the elderly, tourists, etc), the unprepared or time-pressured (who don't have time to fiddle with their phones to install the app at a given shop) and, they hope, the people rich enough that they don't want to fuck about with this today.
"Special offers" also really fuck me off. If I want to buy, say, peanut butter today, there's a statistical upcharge because I'm not carefully synchronising my purchase to a secret schedule of when it will cost 20% less. Whenever I see a special offer now, my immediate thought I'd not what it used to be ("wow, that's great"), it is "ugh, these scammers and their constant games".
Charitably, you could call it an elaborate game to make things cheaper for people with less money who can spend the time, privacy and energy (because poor people always have time and energy...?!) to get the best prices. Realistically it seems like mind games to get you used to overpaying most of the time and overbuying some of the time and handing over the data always.
I tried to use a coupon recently at a major drug store chain, one they had just given me for getting vaccinated, and despite the fact that the coupon said nothing about this requirement, they wouldn’t take it without also using a frequent shopper card.
At some point I have to assume I’ll starve to death because I can no longer buy food, raw or prepared, without a card or app.