Opinion
Help, I’m pathetically addicted to loyalty points
Richard Glover
Broadcaster and columnistAre you a victim of loyalty cards? I am. As with any addiction, it’s good to admit the degree to which you are in its grip. In my case, it’s total pathetic adherence.
I’m the sort of idiot who will drive five kilometres in completely the wrong direction just to find the service station with the four-cents-a-litre supermarket discount. Then I drive five kilometres back, smiling like I’ve won a prize because the fuel I’m burning is so splendidly discounted.
The look of a man who earned a few bonus points from buying a ridiculous amount of slivered almonds he’s never going to use.Credit: iStock
At the supermarket, I activate the app as soon as I approach the store. I’m Pavlov’s dog. Once inside, the app says I get 50 points if I buy slivered almonds, so I throw them in the trolley. Slivered almonds are always on the “extra points list” – presumably, somebody, sometime, slivered too many almonds. It falls to me, and other idiots, to help move this slivery mountain. One slight issue: I have no use for slivered almonds.
In the next aisle, I buy seven cans of organic tinned beans, encouraged, as I was the week before, by the 10-points-per-can offer. I’m now consuming a can of organic beans a day just to build up points. That’s a can too many. Already, there are suboptimal consequences for my partner, co-workers, and even my dog, who looks up after every legume-heavy meal with eyes that say: “You really should knock off the beans.”
All the same, I do the sums. If I invest as little as $20,000 in organic beans, I could, one day, earn enough points to fly one way to Wagga Wagga. Given my bean consumption, I could probably fly there under my own propulsion.
Jocasta, of course, is harrumphing through these purchases. She’s like the partner of a heroin user, watching the addict’s every move. “Where are you going?” she says, as I indicate an intention to enter aisle 11. “There’s nothing we need in aisle 11.”
I look a little furtive. “I think we may have run out of Baygon,” I finally respond, trying to hide my phone, which features an app glowing enticingly, saying, “Buy Baygon, buy Baygon.”
“Baygon?” she says. “Fly spray? We don’t even use fly spray. We have a can of it but it’s all rusty, that’s how little we use it. This is all about points, isn’t it? You’ve been offered points.”
This is the terrible moment in any addict’s life. It’s the instant the partner finds the whiskey bottle hidden in the work briefcase. It’s the minute in which the father, placing his son’s underpants in the drawer, comes across the marijuana. It’s the time you study your grandfather’s background and find he’s a lifelong criminal. (OK, maybe that’s just me.)
Some people, when confronted with such evidence of poor behaviour, admit all. Others maintain their dignity. I decide upon that second course.
“Oh no,” I say, “points have nothing to do with it. It’s true they offer a few points on Baygon, but I was already in the insecticide market, preparing for unforeseen eventualities as a proper husband does – known unknowns, that sort of thing, Bush administration, etc – and since I was already intent on buying a product, then why not get the points...”
Jocasta hardly listens to my rather stirring speech, being too busy rolling her eyes. All she says is, “You are terrible in supermarkets, but you are even worse at the golf club.”
What a knife to my heart! It’s one thing for Jocasta to criticise Colesworth – they are evil, secretly I know it – but now Jocasta is criticising the golf club.
Of course, I don’t play golf. I like my wife! But I do enjoy visiting the club. They have Oysters Kilpatrick which the snobs decry even though they are delicious, and, more importantly, your club card earns you a percentage off every meal, plus a percentage off every drink.
“What percentage?” says Jocasta, an enquiry which I am sure you will join with me in finding offensive.
The point is that after only a year or two of membership, and after many meals in which I happily paid for all our friends (an impulse produced by my desire to build up points), I had a pretty sizeable balance, checkable on the machine in the foyer.
Bragging is not my style, but it would be overly coy not to disclose the outcome. If a person wins a Nobel Prize, the person should disclose this triumph to those who are near and dear. If I were to win a beauty contest, I would whisper the pleasing result into your ear.
So here we go. Just the other day, I enjoyed a free beer at the golf club. Oh, I hear the cynics. “I bet it was a middy. Probably a seven. Mate, you’ve been so ripped off.”
But here’s the thing. It was a full schooner. The glass was chilled (thanks golf club staff). The head was just right (ditto). Oh, and did I mention this? It was free. Oh, and Jocasta also had a free lemon-lime and soda.
If this is victimhood, I rather like it. A beer never tasted better. Now, if I could just lay off the beans.
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.
To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.