The idea is you are invested in the red stores, now. You’ll go out of your way to go to the red shops and not the green shops because you have paid money to make the red ones yours. Never fear, the green shops have their own version of this subscription thing to sell you.

You’ll justify paying more for product X at whichever colour shop you subscribe to, instead of visiting the other colour to get it on special. You’ll soon be telling yourself that you’ll ‘recoup that price difference in your personal discount, anyway’. I promise you, they’re still making a big profit from you. People don’t realise how much money they pay for their groceries - we’ve paid over $100,000 to Colesworth and Aldi in the past decade. It was an eye-opening experience.

I have an objection to paying for subscription shopping services. This, costco, Campbells cash n carry, amazon prime, eBay plus, kogan first, etc… fuck them all. If there’s a free month going with a purchase I’ll take it but I’m not paying for a shopping membership. I usually find there’s better deal out there with a little research rather than focussing just on the shop you’ve got a membership with.

FlyBuys gives explicit permission to track you, a unique identifier, and TOS that they control. With credit card transactions and online ordering there are regulations they have follow. Not that they’re guaranteed to do that, but in theory anyway. They also get your in-store purchases this way, even if you pay cash, so long as you scan the card. I’m fairly sure it does also go to third parties but I’m not in a position to check TOS right now.

They make the money from people forgetting or wanting to save it for another shop, plus the discount isn’t really a saving, you lose a minimum of 2$ out of the deal, 7$ a month for up to 5$ off a shop, so even if everyone was using their discounts Coles still makes a profit of at least 2$.