There’s nothing too surprising in this article about the use of casino loyalty cards, but the scope of the results of their data mining was beyond what I imagined. Like grocery store membership cards, these loyalty cards not only function to accumulate rewards for their holders, but, in addition, the masses of data collected about gambling habits informs the casino’s marketing programs. Harrah’s has 90 market segments identified and can target customers according to their gambling patterns almost immediately. The results: “revenues from customers who carry a Total Rewards card have increased 9% year on year.”