Exit the Spotify Wrapped, here is your “Cumulus recap”. My colleague ate a lot of bananas in 2025.Image: watson
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If you have a Cumulus card and have recently opened the Migros app, you may have had a slight moment of hesitation. Something like: “Wait… they really know all this about me?”
31.12.2025, 13:4631.12.2025, 13:46
For several days, the orange giant has been offering its customers a personalized annual retrospective, directly inspired by the now famous Spotify Wrapped. Same mechanics, same promise: tell you about your year through your data.
Except that here, it’s not a question of the Bad Bunny songs that you would have sanded down to the bone in 2025, or of your (canonical) listening age, but… of your races.
Exit the Spotify Wrapped, here is the “Cumulus recap”. Concretely, Migros offers its users an ultra-detailed annual report of their purchasing behavior. In the application, we discover, pell-mell:
- Your total number of checkouts over the year
- Your top 3 most often purchased products
- The branch you visited most regularly
- The number of total products you purchased
- And even the time you most often check out
Everything is presented in the form of colorful slides, with fun graphics and helpful little sentences.
It’s pretty, it’s fun.screenshots
At first glance, the initiative makes you smile. Some users send each other screenshots, share them on social networks, compare their habits, laugh about their obsession with a certain yogurt…
When fun gives way to slight discomfort
Where Spotify Wrapped plays with relatively abstract musical tastes (declaring to the author of these lines that she is 63 when she is 34 (and she is only 29)), Migros touches on something much more intimate.
Your hours spent in store tell the story of your pace of life. Your recurring purchases shape your eating habits (and for some, your all-consuming passion for bananas, like this colleague who sent me his own screenshots).
Banana passion.screenshots
This “Cumulus Wrapped” also shows you which branch is your favorite, almost indicating where you live or work. Put together, these elements form your behavioral portrait, and it is very, very precise.
What is disturbing is not so much that Migros, through your use of the Cumulus card, holds this data. The very principle of a loyalty card is based on the collection of information.
No, what can be confusing is the staging of this gentle surveillance. The fact that we’re showing it to you is a way of saying:
“Look how well we know you, personally, each of you”
This personalized retrospective normalizes the idea that each of your checkout visits is recorded, analyzed and archived. On paper, Migros is on target. Cumulus card users agree, when registering, that their data will be collected and used for analysis and marketing purposes. Legally, nothing scandalous.
And that’s a lot of points.screenshots
But from there to seeing written in black and white (or rather white on colored backgrounds made in Migros) the extent of the information generated by gestures as banal as the purchase of a packet of pasta on a Tuesday at 6:42 p.m., a milestone has been reached. This annual recap makes visible what usually remains invisible. Did you have a concrete idea of the information you gave to the brand before “Cumulus Wrapped”? And if Migros knows all this… what else could it know tomorrow?
Du marketing malin ou too much?
From a strategic point of view, the operation is rather clever. It reinforces engagement, encourages people to open the application, and gives a feeling of proximity between the brand and the customer. But this proximity makes the line increasingly blurred between personalized service and a form of hyper-profiling.
Today, we show you your preferred time to buy bananas, tomorrow, this same data could be used to refine promotions, adjust prices, guide your choices.
Imagine that bananas are more expensive between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., because that’s the time when Migros knows you’re shopping
Since launching our annual music recap, Spotify has turned watching into entertainment. Migros applies the recipe to our shopping habits. And here we are applauding an algorithm that knows our habits very, very well. It may not be scandalous, moreover, it is legal. But it’s not completely trivial either.
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