On the surface, it seems like a great idea...

But in practice, it gets cumbersome and annoying for two different reasons.

1) Some stores are incredibly aggressive with these things. At my local pharmacy down the street, there was a time when you *could not* buy anything from them unless you had a card. If you didn't have one, then they would scan a brand new card, and put it in your bag.

At one point, I had about 20 of them, I took them all in to the Store Manager, dumped them on his counter, and let him know he was partially responsible for our climbing gas prices (plastic is a petroleum product, etc.)

2) If you frequent numerous stores, all having their own "card", it gets to be impossible to carry all of them with you all at the same time. For guys in particular, it's no fun having 12 of these things in your wallet, or 12 of the "min" versions attached to your keys.

So in response, you don't carry all of them with you all the time. Once you start doing that, you invariably run into situation #1 above.

The idea is good, but I think that ultimately the implementation of these things is going to require some adjusting.

Either that, or we as a society have become trained to put up with any inconvenience thrown our way in exchange for saving 13 cents on a carton of milk.

~Mike