Just Thinking

In recent years customer loyalty schemes have been all the rage. They range from having a stamp put on a card when you buy another book or greeting card at the stationers to a pre-paid card that give special prices when you buy pizza or movie tickets, from special petrol price vouchers when you buy groceries to fly buys on everything that you purchase. They are retailers attempts to get you to keep using their stores. This article examines whether these schemes can possibly benefit anyone.

One way that I like to look at things is to see what would happen if everyone did the same thing. After all, if the scheme is a good one, everyone will copy it. So the end result of these customer loyalty schemes is now clearly visible.

You now have to keep loads of bits of paper and cards with you all the time, waste time at shops and checkouts getting stuff filled in and stamped, get really annoyed when you finally get enough stamps on your book club card only to find that the original purchase date is too long ago and the offer has expired, and you pay for all the paper work in the prices --- and collectively the retailers are doing more work, employing marketing idiots (yes, you know who you are) to do nothing useful and collectively not getting 1 cent more income between them. They must have to put up their prices to pay for all their extra costs. We are paying more to have our time wasted. If they didn't do this they could have a price advantage which is what people really want.

People are not spending more. All the businesses are getting the same total income. They are all spending more money doing this stuff. They are wasting money on running the schemes. They are wasting time while their employees do the paperwork. They are paying for extra materials that all end up in rubbish dumps. They are annoying their customers. It is madness if you even think about it for a few minutes.

Please, why don't they all agree to call it off. If they don't we need to all agree to never shop at a place that offers these schemes. Prices must be able to be kept lower if no silly schemes are run. Let us never shop at such places.

My conclusion is that we live in an age ruled by marketing hype, and full of people that cannot think straight. These things are not worthy the time spent on them. They benefit no-one. They waste everyone's time. People knock on your door and phone you incessantly with special offers that are useless to those selling them and those buying them. They employ people in jobs that should not exist. Let them get a proper job doing something useful.

A related scheme is the people that telephone and tell you that you have won something, when really they are trying to get you enrolled in some pathetic scheme. My conversations with them go like this.

Me: Hello

Them : Congratulations, you have won a package worth $170 ...

Me: No thanks.

Them: ... but I haven't told you all the benefits of ...

Me: No thanks. I don't need it.

Them: ... its free and you get all this wonderful ...

Me: No thanks. I don't want it.

Them: let me tell you about ...

Me: No thanks. Good-bye.

How can any self respecting person spend hours on the phone each day annoying people with promises of free things, when they know that they are lying? It must cause serious stress to do this. Even worse, the people that dream up this stuff! They should all have to spend 3 months ringing each other and answering calls day and night until they surrender and promise never to pester anyone or tell a lie for the rest of their life.