The loyalty card fob

It hangs, in most cases, from a keyring, several positions down from the house key, worn smooth on one face where a thumb finds it by habit rather than by looking. A well-carried one has done this for six years, unfailingly: a rectangle of laminated plastic, 5.4 by 3.2 centimeters by direct measurement, a barcode on one side and a logo, mostly rubbed away now, on the other. It performs one function, which is to be scanned, and performs it without variation, without update, without ever once suggesting that a phone app might do the same job more efficiently, which it would, and which a certain kind of owner declines to install on a principle that cannot be fully articulated. Such owners keep a small collection of these in a drawer, seven or so, from stores no longer patronized or no longer standing, each one a barcode for a discount program since folded into some other program under some other name. They do not get thrown away. This is not sentiment, or not only sentiment; it is that each one still, technically, works, and a thing that would still perform its one job if asked is a hard thing to discard. The fob does not know it has been superseded by an app, a phone number typed at the register, a face scanned at self-checkout. It continues to scan correctly regardless, a fact confirmed four times this year alone, out of something close to due diligence.

Marion Vale