Meta view: they're discarding loyalty as an ROI tool in favor of short-term profit maximization and customer exploitation. To the extent they still imply there are broad-gauge rewards for loyal buying behavior, it is somewhere between bait-and-switch deception and operational fraud. "What they plan next" will depend on whether they have to modify this approach in the next protracted recession to stimulate business, or whether the anti-competitive oligopoly is now so blastproof, they won't need to bother. I tend to think the latter.