Is its own Reward

A Rewards Club should be a Win/Win Club

Having been born and raised in rural Lancaster County Pennsylvania, I have a cultural archetype of a convenience store being Turkey Hill Minit Markets. Experiencing High School in the early 1980s I am familiar with the frozen Slushey machines, the introduction of gas pumps in the mid-1970s, the installation of an ATM and the venerable Pac-Man and Defender arcade games that consumed the majority of my quarters while not playing Atari 2600 with my friends. I am also a big fan of the Kroger Company which purchased Turkey Hill in 1985, having spent 11 years in Ohio through graduate school and my initial years of professional employment.

I was thrilled when Turkey Hill built a new Minit Market down the road from my home in the Philadelphia suburbs. Not that I have any ill will toward other regional competitors like Wawa, Sheetz and 7-Eleven, but it is a slice of down-home nostalgia to fill-up at Turkey Hill on my way to work. Plus, like a lot of other folks, I'm addicted to Turkey Hill Iced Tea and even follow their facebook fan page.

I signed up immediately when Turkey Hill issued a Rewards Club program this past April. It involved picking up a plastic sheet containing a magnetic stripe card and barcoded key fobs and an application form to be filled out and returned to the store. I promptly submitted the application and slid the card in my wallet. I showed my card before every eligible purchase for the next month and have so far accumulated 40 points -- well on my way to the milepost of 100 points to receive a reward. The reward being a 10-cent per gallon discount on a single fill up of gasoline. meh.

My fuel-sipping Corolla strains to need 10 gallons at a fill up, only after I've been running on "E" for a few miles. At $2.75 per gallon, that would equal a reward of $1.00 off a fill up of $27.50. Again -- meh. At a rate of 2 points per every $1 spent in the store, that results in a 2% reward. Not that I am whining about a free rewards program, but at my current rate of points accumulation I can budget a $1 reward every two months. For the price of $6/year Turkey Hill gets my email address, my street address, my home phone number, and the ability to track all of my purchases. They can data mine my account and discover I make most of my purchases before 6 am during the weekday and after 6 pm on the weekends. They can know I like Turkey Hill Iced Tea and visit the Minit Market more often when the Iced Tea is the loss-leader special for the month.

So it is not a "free" Rewards Program, it is an "exchange" Rewards Program. They get my information and also my promise to choose to carry the plastic rewards card in my wallet along with the other 8 or so discount membership cards from other vendors. Or I can choose to attach the plastic key fob to my key ring along with the other 8 or so discount membership fobs from other vendors. I also can choose to produce the card to be scanned before every purchase or to say the phrase "No, I don't have my card with me" or "No, I don't want to join the Rewards Program, but thanks anyway" before every purchase. Summing up the amount of effort required to participate or decline to participate in the program over the year, I'm not sure it is worth the exchange price of $6.00.

Perhaps I would be more inclined to participate if we had a universal Rewards Club card. I know I'm going to set the privacy advocates spinning, but I like the thought of having a Universal ID card using RFID that identifies me at the time of purchase. I could manage my information on a single website that would allow me to opt in or opt out of discount and reward programs at all vendor locations. Removing the hassle of managing  and transporting my host of plastic cards would reduce the pain of sitting on my wallet all day and would allow me to log my viewing preferences automatically the next time I rent Minority Report.

The New Moon Hoax

When College Students Know more about Werewolves than the Apollo Program

I have noticed a sad trend over the past decade of teaching fundamental physics to freshman college students. I use a very popular standard college text for a course that teaches the basics of kinematics, energy, momentum and thermodynamics. I can recall my own instructors lamenting the poor algebra skills of their current crop of students and that appears to be a perennial condition. But as with all skills, mathematic gymnastics improve with practice and we all get there eventually.

The bigger problem is with the generational understanding of technology. Scores of authors and futurists have warned of the perils of increasingly rapid technological development -- an exponential explosion of new gadgets and social practices that would leave our current students behind the advances of more forward-looking societies. Well, that does not appear to be the case. Middle school students are born with the ability to text and manage social networking profiles with ease. The inherited instincts to run at the sound of a low growl are apparently being replaced  by a proclivity to press buttons and multi-task streams of information.

The difficulty is not in keeping up with the future, but in keeping up with the past. In the United States, courses in History have been replaced by the examination of Social Studies - in an attempt to understand the importance of multiculturalism. While this is a noble goal, social networking is bringing multiculturalism into extinction. With the ability to chat and share files with humans all over the planet our students are forging common experiences that are quickly steering entire societies into a mono-cultural human experience. However, with the loss of History courses, major events in the past are disappearing from our own cultural fabric.

This is extremely evident in the physics textbook we are using. The acceleration of gravity at sea level on the earth, known as "g" is listed to be 9.81 m/s/s at three significant figures. After using this value to calculate distances, velocities and time in projectile motion scenarios, the textbook seeks to reinforce the student's understanding by asking questions about our moon. The gravitational acceleration value "g" on the surface of the Moon is 1.63 m/s/s. This leads to all sorts of questions about falling objects, projectile motion and forces on the Apollo Lunar Module used to safely deposit and remove humans from the Moon's surface. And that is where the importance of History lessons comes in.

When the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon in July, 1969, I was a 3-year old toddler that was watching the landing on our family's black and white television in my father's lap. I don't have vivid memories of my preschool years, but I most definitely remember that event. Ever since, refrigerator boxes were immediately converted into space ships, spare sheets of graph paper were strewn with designs for flying saucers, posters of images from the voyager probes adorned my bedroom walls and even my space shuttle models in college became visual props as I explained the Challenger disaster to my classmates. I was mortally wounded a few years back when one of my college freshmen asked a question concerning a problem on the final examination for my physics course -- "Dr. Weaver, what is a Lunar Module?"

Undeterred,  I rephrased the question in subsequent versions of the exam to substitute "spaceship". But of course this year, the question came -- "Dr. Weaver, don't we need to know the length of the runway on the moon in order to calculate the answer to this spaceship problem?" I have to keep reminding myself that these college freshmen were born the same year the Challenger's replacement shuttle Endeavor made its maiden voyage, 30 years after we last visited the Moon.

As with all emergent system properties, success has to be continually achieved -- or the knowledge of that success gets stuck in the past. If the success is not memorialized, it is soon forgotten and ultimately treated as myth. That is why we celebrate important milestones in our culture -- birthdays, July 4th, Easter. As I write this, Space Shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth on its final mission. Shuttles Discovery and Endeavor are scheduled to make their final flights later this Fall. The International Space Station is scheduled to be defunded  five years later in 2016. With all of the political genuflecting about high-technology jobs of the future I am flabbergasted by the lack of vision for manned spaced flight and the exploration of space. After our smart phones soon connect us through the use of automated real-time translation we can spend the time celebrating our mono-culturalism and debating the hoaxes perpetrated through the use of Hollywood sounds stages. But then again, perhaps we will choose to use our new-found collaboration tools to explore the heavens instead of fighting over the redistribution of finite resources here on the Earth.