Editing 2006: Customer Rewards

{{comic
| number    = 2006
| date      = June 13, 2018
| title     = Customer Rewards
| image     = customer_rewards.png
| titletext = We'll pay you $1.47 to post on social media about our products, $2.05 to mention it in any group chats you're in, and 11 cents per passenger each time you drive your office carpool past one of our billboards.
}}

==Explanation==
Many supermarkets offer customers {{w|loyalty program}}s 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 {{w|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.

{| class="wikitable"
!style="width:15%"|Amount
!style="width:20%"|Reward offers
!style="width:65%"|Explanation
|-
|24¢
|Last name
|Possibly used to gather additional data from Facebook or to guess the customer's ethnicity.
|-
|35¢
|List of family members
|So that the merchant can send them targeted advertisements.
|-
|79¢
|Cell number
|So that the merchant can send you targeted telemarketing advertisements.
|-
|$1.20
|Facebook posts
|So that the merchant can see what you're interested in and tailor advertisements to you.
|-
|$1.47
|Post products on social media
|Paying the customer to create advertisements for them.
|-
|$2.05
|Mention products in group chats
|Movie and television studios get kickbacks from companies when products are mentioned or used in media.
|-
|11¢
|Per passenger when driving past billboard in office carpool
|Like putting the store's ads on your website, blog, or podcast.

|}
All this information is used to send personalized ads which have a better chance of succeeding and earning money for the store owner.

All the items except the last come to $6.10, meaning the customer would need to pick up the last item 154 times in order to incur a profit on this set of transactions, not including cost of transportation.  (Perhaps driving 7 passengers past 22 billboards, or past the same billboard 22 times.)  Presumably there would be limits to prevent the customer from gaming the system like this.

==Transcript==
:[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.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Characters with hats]]