It’s potentially a futile and quite costly protest, but it’s the one I have chosen.
Two weeks ago, I needed petrol. Where I live, every petrol station has special prices for loyalty members, and all are connected to a supermarket chain. New World has its own petrol and it is always the cheapest in town (with receipt, of course). Great, I thought. We don’t usually shop there but we need cat food, so I’ll buy it at New World and then use the receipt for cheap petrol.
In the store, the blessings kept coming. The cats’ food was on special! A full 30% cheaper than usual! Except when I got to the checkout, it scanned at full price, more expensive than any other supermarket. “Have you got a Club Card?” asked the operator. “No,” I said. She looked confused. “It’s much cheaper with a card,” she said. “I know, but I don’t have one,” I said.
We stood in silence while I paid $5 more than the advertised price for the cat food, then used the receipt to save $2.13 in petrol.
And yet, not even that humiliating exercise can make me sign up for any of the supermarket rewards programmes. In the grand scheme of things, it is potentially a futile and quite costly protest, but it’s the one my partner and I have chosen. Because supermarket rewards programmes in 2026 are, to me, the canary in the coalmine, heralding the end of civilisation.
I haven’t always treated shopping clubs like the devil incarnate. When I was about 10 years old, Woolworths introduced the One Card. A gorgeous plastic card with a blueberry image and your name on it that promised extra savings and cash rewards. I immediately signed up because I wanted to get a letter in the mail and I wanted something to put in my velcro wallet that wasn’t small change.
For a period, I accompanied my mum on our giant weekly shops, and asked her to swipe my One Card instead of hers at the checkout. Surprisingly quickly (turns out shopping for a household of 12 earns you mega points), I got another letter in the mail with a shiny $10 Woolworths voucher for me to spend as I pleased. It was one of the most thrilling things to ever happen to me.
At the time, New World also had a Club Card, but it was cardboard and every checkout operator had a stack of them held together by a rubber band that they’d scan for you if you didn’t have one. There were special Club deals but no one ever missed out if they didn’t have the card.
Those innocent days of supermarket fun (which I now know were behavioural teaching) are over.
While we were sleeping (read: buying things we didn’t need in order to get some plastic bricks), the supermarket duopoly quietly laid the foundations for New Zealand’s most comprehensive, in my opinion, surveillance exercise.
Before you fashion me a lovely tinfoil hat, let me explain.
Shopping for groceries is meeting a basic human need: food and toiletries. It’s something literally everyone has to do and it can’t be opted out of. In an ideal world, we shouldn’t have to think too much about it, because buying toothpaste should take up very little space in our lives.
Instead, because of its necessary place in our capitalist world, the supermarket is one of the most surveilled places in New Zealand. There’s CCTV everywhere, facial recognition cameras in Pak’nSave and New World, and monitoring cameras at self-checkouts. I know that if it was required for whatever reason, someone could scan the CCTV footage of my nearest supermarket and see what I bought on Sunday. I’ve come to accept that I am being filmed constantly and from all angles at the supermarket.
But what I cannot do is voluntarily supply all of my other personal details and spending habits to companies that will only ever use them to make more money. Yes, I buy oat milk once a week, twice if there’s a deal. Yes, I try to only buy cat food when it’s on special. Yes, I coincidentally buy chips and chocolate at the same time as tampons (also only on special). I know this and now you know this, and that’s as far as it needs to go.
Supermarkets, through their rewards programmes, track every single purchase you make, when you buy certain products, when you don’t buy certain products. They have all of your personal details (of course), and could easily, if they wanted, connect those on-paper details to your car and your face thanks to CCTV and checkout cameras. They could safely guess how much you earn and when you get paid based on your spending habits over time. They’ll know when you’re pregnant and when you’ve had children.
For rewards programme members, the supermarket could probably paint a clearer picture of you and your life than your own friends could. Except where friends learn about you in order to be a better friend when you need it most, the supermarkets gather screeds of your information and data in order to better encourage you to give them more money.
New Zealand doesn’t have dynamic pricing at supermarkets but it isn’t so farfetched to imagine a future where every shopper receives personalised “specials” according to their shopping habits. Prices will shift constantly depending on demand, and if a supermarket knows you’re willing to pay $10 for a block of butter (because you’ve done it before and they’re aware of this), that’s what your butter will always cost. If they know that you will always buy multiple items when there’s a multi-special, guess who’s about to get a whole bunch of multi-specials?
Would it feel mutually beneficial to shoppers? Absolutely. But the thought of my weekly (or daily) shopping being constantly massaged by a machine, largely without me realising, is a genuine dystopian nightmare.
And that’s all without the regularly scheduled nationwide infantilisation of grown adults in the form of sticker promotions. In writing this, I asked a few colleagues to show me how their preferred supermarket programmes worked. There was a list of products that this person acknowledged they would never think to buy, with special bonus points attached. Would they buy them now to get the points? “Probably.”
At New World, my overpriced cat food wasn’t just on special, it was a special special, offering bonus stickers for the Smeg knives promotion where shoppers get stickers for spending more money and in return can “buy” Smeg knives (while stocks last). Is anyone else not going crazy reading that sentence??? It’s at least better than Woolworths, where children are weaponised against their parents through plastic tat promotions instead of knives. Spend more on groceries to get stickers to get a plastic toy or knife or brick. Or spend more on groceries to get points to save a few dollars on exorbitant petrol prices. The only certainty is that you’ll spend more.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a promotion, and so does my whole family. My older brothers collected every single mini All Blacks figurine in 1995 during a Caltex promotion. Years later, when Shell had six red Ferrari cars on offer with purchase, I once again talked my mum into filling up at the more expensive station in order to collect the set. Somewhere in the attic is a full booklet of the Weet-Bix Hurricanes collectible player cards from 2004 – I saved up my allowance to buy little triangle stickers to secure them in the book.
But now the promotions and rewards don’t feel fun. Supermarkets and petrol companies teaming up to put colourful stickers on our cost-of-living crisis in exchange for every single data point we have as a person can only ever make our lives worse. Every new “reward” is like getting staff pizzas when you asked for a pay rise. You really needed a pay rise but I guess some pizza is better than no pizza.
Even though it ironically means I sometimes spend even more money at the supermarket than I have to, I’m committed to never stepping onto the hamster wheel of loyalty. The world advances in ways that we all must adapt to, and there are plenty of areas where I’ve covered my eyes in the name of convenience and frugality. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who chooses to get what they can out of this duopoly nightmare. But I will always choose to spend an extra dollar to buy my chips, chocolate and tampons in peace.
