My dad kept a similar tally for haircuts at his old shop, 40 years of tick marks in the same ledger book, and he said it helped him notice when regulars were starting to fade out. Numbers give you a quiet way to measure the loyalty you build without making a big deal of it.

That's some serious dedication, respect.

The part about cutting fraud by 60% in just 3 weeks really shows how fast people adjust when they know there's a rule. It's like once they realize they can't just walk in with a random item and get cash, the whole game changes. I bet a bunch of those fraudsters weren't even pros, just regular people testing the system because it was so easy. And the ID requirement probably scares off the casual ones who don't want their name attached to a shady return. What's wild is that the store probably kept the policy for so long just because it sounded customer friendly, but nobody checked the real cost. If you think about it, that $47k was basically paying for a policy that made shopping worse for honest people too, since stores usually jack up prices to cover those losses.

Fancy straw indeed, marketing wins over physics every time.

My darkroom timer from 1987 agrees with @lilymurphy, sometimes the weird stuff just works.