I currently work at Capillary Technologies, which powers some of the loyalty programs mentioned in this article.
I grew up in Morocco. And like most Moroccans, I had what you might call a loyalty program long before I knew what one was.
There was the same bakery at the corner of our street that my mother had been going to for fifteen years not because it was the cheapest, but because the owner knew her order, asked after our family, and always slipped in an extra msemen on Fridays....