Why a club keeps records about you

A dealer does not know your name. A club does — your name, your date of birth, your membership number, the tier you are on and every purchase you have made. That is a real difference, and anyone who joins a club and does not notice it has not been paying attention.

It is worth being straight about why it is that way, because "we take your privacy seriously" is what everybody says and almost nobody explains.

The records are the model

The freedom a club operates inside is a private, personal one belonging to adults. Every part of that sentence has to be demonstrable, not merely asserted:

• Adults. Age has to be verified by a person, in the room, against a document. A club that cannot show who it checked and when has not checked.
• Members. A private members' club is private and has members; that means a register, and a register is a record.
• Personal. Allowances only mean something if what somebody has taken is actually counted. An allowance nobody tracks is a slogan.

Take the records away and what is left is not a more private club. It is a shop that keeps no books, which is a different thing wearing the same name.

What is kept, and what is not

The register holds what a register needs: who you are, that your age was verified and by whom, your membership status and tier, and what you bought. Purchases are recorded because stock has to reconcile and allowances have to count — the same reason any business knows what left its shelves.

What sits alongside that is more interesting. Prices you were charged carry the discount and the tier name they were priced with, so a receipt reprinted a year from now still explains itself even if the tier has changed since. Changes to your record are logged with who made them and what they were before. Notes staff write about you are ordinary text, visible to staff — worth knowing, and worth them remembering when writing one.

Your stated preferences and any cultivar ratings you leave are yours; they exist to match what is on the shelf to what you actually like, not to be a profile of you.

What you are owed in return

Three things, and a club that does not offer them is worth asking about.

• Sight of it. Your own record should be visible to you. That is much of what the member portal is for: your membership status, your allowance, your spending, your full purchase history, in your hand rather than on request.
• Correction. Records about people contain mistakes. A misspelled name or a wrong date should be fixable by asking, and the correction itself should leave a trace.
• Proportion. A club should hold what the model actually requires and not quietly accumulate more because storage is cheap.

The bargain, stated plainly

You are trading a degree of anonymity for accountability — for knowing what you are buying, that an adult sold it to an adult, that what you were charged can be explained, and that the whole arrangement can stand up to being looked at. That is a reasonable trade, and it is only reasonable while the club treats the record as something it holds on your behalf rather than something it owns about you.

Ask what is kept about you. A club that answers easily is telling you something; so is one that does not.