Okay the title is a bit exaggerated, but honestly not far off. This post is very mundane and a bit long, but thought it fits the community.
I’m visiting my home country and went shopping for pants, there were “30% off everything!” signs with a tiny text underneath that said “member discount” (don’t have membership). Not a problem, did not notice and I don’t care for such marketing tricks to get you into the store but okay.
Picked up couple of pants, went to the cashier and they asked me “do you have our membership?” - I answered no and expected the follow up question whether I’d like to join, but, to my positive surprise the cashier just happily responded “okay, not a problem!” and continued to bag my stuff.
I stood ready to pay and then the cashier said “now I just need your phone number and you can pay”. Hold up. What. I did not expect that, I honestly had a burst of anger inside me (never gonna take it on a cashier, they are just doing their job). I asked nicely why do I need to give my phone number and I was told that to register me as a member so I can get the discount.
I declined and said I don’t want to join and would like to just pay.
The entire interaction after questioning why they need my phone number was awkward, as if I had been the first person to decline, the weirdo, aluminum foil hat wearing hermit.
This was just one of many interactions in the recent years that make me feel as if I was a weirdo for not sharing all my info around. The worst is when everyone keeps telling me “its just an app, just download it and use that why do you make things complicated” or “just sign up you don’t need to pay anything”.
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Not to retail workers. The vast majority of them are underpaid and overworked. Between the stressful nature of a job like that and the various stresses that tend to come along with being an adult working for anywhere near minimum wage they probably don’t have the mental bandwidth to care about anything beyond their ability to get by. You’re not going to change anything by being a dick to someone like that.
Now if you happen to run into a developer or similarly paid person for a company like Meta or Google, absolutely be a dick to them. They’ve chosen to work for evil and have the means to choose otherwise. Acute social pressure could actually make them care and choose something else.
You’re very kind, mister/miss. On the other hand, my opinion is very radical. The problem is that retail workers not only are a part of the system but also they often mind it and argue when you try not to opt in for privacy-hostile memberships. Some of them may do it because of stress but it’s impossible to know every one’s case so just ruining lives of all of them should be good enough. After all if they didn’t care, they wouldn’t mind us opting out.