Driving Up Profits with Loyalty (or Driving Down?) The Butterfly Café is located in downtown San Francisco and offers specialty coffee, teas, and organic fruits and vegetables. The café holds a number of events to attract customers such as live music, poetry readings, book clubs, charity events, and local artist's night. A listing of all participants attending each event is tracked in the café's database.
The café uses the information for marketing campaigns and offers customers who attend multiple events additional discounts. A marketing database company, InTheKnow.com , has offered to pay the Butterfly Café a substantial amount of money for access to its customer database, which it will then sell to other local businesses. The owner of the Butterfly Café, Penny Dirks, has come to you for advice. She is not sure if her customers would appreciate her selling their personal information and how it might affect her business.
However, the amount of money InTheKnow.com is offering is enough to finance her much-needed new patio for the back of the café. InTheKnow.com has promised that the sale will be completely confidential. What should Dirks do?