Do you max your loyalty points?

[Strix]

Shopping at Sainsbury's has become an irritating experience since obtaining a nectar card. Standing at the till going through heaps of bits of paper to see if I can redeem any of their random vouchers, holding up the queue, and dropping half the contents of my credit card holder whilst trying to keep a small child in order and load my shopping into the trolley really isn't any fun, and I always come away just knowing I'm not Nectaring to the max... and then they give you the vouchers for schools afterwards, and sometimes MORE flaming vouchers to clutter your purse up for the next fortnight, falling onto the floor in every retail outlet you visit until then

 

Don't get me started on Boots either!

I used to buy lots of Christmas presents there, but they jacked the prices up and stuck them all on 3 for 2, so it just became a nightmare getting value for money. How practical do they actually think it is for every customer to use the points machine in store before even starting shopping? And how the heck do you know if the 'extra points for £30' is going to apply to you until you've actually DONE your shopping?

 

Tesco are a real pet hate though - trying to dictate what you buy with their voucher system, and then they make it even MORE complicated by making you go to a desk to upgrade them to double their value before you can do your shopping

 

Presumably there's a whole heap of people working in offices somewhere that don't actually do their own shopping. In my opinion, they could all go sign on and we wouldn't miss their contribution to modern society one little bit

 

Does anybody else wish we could go back to just shopping, or is everybody else a points junky?

[megalithic]

I never enter into any form of loyalty scheme, ever.

See the chorus of

.

[0742Sheff]

What are loyalty cards/points? I go where my money stretches the furthest.

 

There isn't a single store in Sheffield that deserves my loyalty apart from Guage Singh. Yes it is a small local shop but he has never let me down and in the past he has let me do the equivalent of a full weeks shop for free when i was down and out.

 

There is no supermarket i know of that would do that.

[medusa]

I've got a Tesco points card, but we no longer buy our shopping at Tesco and they no longer offer the normal rate of points on petrol purchases, so there's not much to collect even if I did bother to get it out of my purse.

 

My Boots card did come in very handy at one point- I searched online for a new washer and found that the one that we wanted was cheapest on the Boots website, and it had the added bonus of coming with Boots points, so I saved £30 by buying there in the first place, then got enough points to buy a new hairdryer and some perfume with the points that I got on my card.

 

I can't remember the last time that I used either card though. These days I just don't bother with them and I'd rather shop around and buy stuff from whichever shop is the most convenient or best value at the time.

[alchresearch]

I've just got a Sainsburys Nectar card. Their fuel is the cheapest in town so I regularly fill up there and I've got about £50 accumulated just for doing nothing.

[Tess]

I love my boots points! They grow so quickly which is great but I think its because as I know I have one, i'm inclined to spend more in the first place to get the points. Very useful at Christmas though.

[Mecky]

It's all a big con to get you to part with more money i.e. targetted marketing through data mining. The supermatkets/shops will already know tonnes about the individual, and in my opinion too much, if they perchase products by derict debit cards. It's the reason why I try and make frequent purchases with cash only.

[Rich]

I have a Tesco Clubcard which I use every time, but as I live alone I don't buy enough to get a lot of points, they do send me vouchers though occassionally. I also have a Reward card from Game which I use regularly to get points for game purchases, and when I worked in the Meadowhall store in 1997 I had a Boots card, but didn't use it much.

[Classic Rock]

I have a Tesco card but don't like the vouchers they send and I rarely shop there. Nectar on the other hand I've found better, I always swipe the card at fuel stations and was with EDF last year so got quite a few points that way. Every couple of years I'll go to Argos to buy something electrical and use the nectar points. I think I traded in £30 of points on a purchase recently. I don't monitor in any way what there is on the card so it's a surprise when I go.

 

Boots, again I just swipe when there and trade in if there's enough to cover the purchase. I have a friend who has saved about £120 in Boots points to use at Christmas. This makes me a bit nervous - if she lost her purse, that's as good as cash as there's no security on the card.

[the_rudeboy]

A Nectar card is worth having, it can be used to collect points at dozens of stores (over 500 online stores, I believe)