[kogepathic]

> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?

[josefx]

> If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.

[Freak_NL]

When I subscribe to these I've usually already found that either they are the only shop to carry that product, or are already the cheapest. The 10% discount is just an extra at that point.

[kevin_thibedeau]

This sort of person is a spend-a-holic. They use "sales" as an excuse to engage in unnecessary discretionary spending.

[SoftTalker]

LOL yes I had a friend who would buy stuff because it was on sale and talk about how much money he "saved." I would always ask "do you have more or less money now?"

[loloquwowndueo]

Because once they have your email and can link it to your identity via your purchase details they’re going to sell that list to some marketer sleazeball and you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?

[thrill]

“you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?”

So … ops normal?

[wat10000]

My email has been out there for 25+ years now. Filtering has been able to handle it for all but the first couple of years of that period.

[lkbm]

I've signed up for plenty of these lists with per-site emails, and it's very rare for me to end up getting email from anyone but the list I signed up for. Might be different when shopping on international sites (though I doubt it's worse in the EU), but in the US, sites generally don't sell your email. More likely they'll leak it accidentally.