I remember when Shirley and I were in Victoria, Canada back in 2014. We had a hotel room on the waterfront - complete with cooking facilities. One night, rather than going out to eat, we decided to purchase some provisions from a nearby, moderately-sized supermarket.
When we reached the checkout, it immediately became clear that the various prices we had spotted around the store were only available to customers with loyalty cards. Of course, being tourists, we did not have a loyalty card and so our bill more or less doubled. Thankfully, there was a nice Canadian lady behind us in the checkout queue and she offered to buy our items using her loyalty card and then we could reimburse her at the ATM. It saved us a substantial amount of money.
In 2014, such loyalty schemes were not that advanced in England. However, during the past ten years the age of the loyalty card has truly arrived and without loyalty cards you effectively end up paying penalties.
My favoured budget supermarket was Lidl. I shopped there twice a week - spending thousands of pounds in the course of a decade. However, they brought in a loyalty scheme called "Lidl Plus" which has gradually increased its customer benefits. Unfortunately, no physical loyalty cards were ever issued. The only way you could access the scheme was through having the "Lidl Plus" app on a smartphone.
In spite of protests, letters and critical reviews, I was ostracized. Clearly, Lidl didn't give a fig about me - nor other genuinely loyal customers who do not possess smartphones. Yes folks - I am not the only one!
Finally, I decided that enough was enough and so a month ago I stopped shopping at Lidl. Nowadays, I instead go to Aldi which does not have a loyalty scheme and I very much hope that that remains the case in future months and years.
After all, nobody likes to be a victim of discriminatory business practice.
Curious why you don't have a smart phone. All the oldies into their 90's I know have one, and most have a smart watch too.
ReplyDeleteTo me it's curious why you have a smartphone J and it is even more curious why those old people would waste money on smartwatches.
DeleteHere many stores used to have these loyalty cards. Very few of them offered instant discounts at the checkout counter. Most of them let you accumulate points for the purchases you made, and then those points could be redeemed before a particular date.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, these cards were clearly meant to entrap customers into buying from those stores. But, there there was always a fineprint as well.
But, I don't find these cards now.
I think it's because the number of people coming into these physical stores has dwindled with most people preferring to buy online where you get heavy discounts.