StuartPlymouth wrote:That is indeed worryingly obsessive, cdd. The best idea is to have one for every shop, and then the loyalty aspect becomes irrelevant.
Oh no, that really is only the tip of the iceberg of problems. Here are a select extra few that would seriously trouble me (and these are just the things I have foreseen, and a partial list at that):
I would have to take different cards with me on each trip since I should know in advance whether I am going to Sainsbury's or Tesco etc. I already do this with things like driver's license and railcards, but this is a less frequent eventuality.
In the supermarket I would have to worry about whether the points made it sufficiently more worthwhile to buy a more expensive version of a product I liked because I would be in net gain (complexified even more with 2 for 3 offers etc). At least at the moment I can see the best product immediately.
I would have to keep all my receipts like a sad pathetic person and reconcile them against my statement to make sure I wasn't missing points.
I would also have to make notes of items that are on special clubcard point offers.
I would have to deal with coupons offering discounts/xtra points on products I don't want/like and work out where the thershold is between "dislike enough" and "net discount". These would only be one-time purchases too since it wouldn't remain the rational decision, meaning I would have products that would only stick around for a while. So I might end up with two sandwiches made of different bread. Of course this eventuality will come around twice, at each end of the replacement.
See, after all this fretting about point values, my statement would arrive and I would have to think very carefully about the highest value conversion from points into cash or needed item, which would be a whole differnet set of calcuations including if there was anything I wanted, the liquidity of items on offer, etc.
And I would keep having to decide whether it was more worthwhile buying something or waiting for a larger purchase that may be more liquid or wanted at the cost of losing interest.
And I would have to have a loyalty card for
every shop I shop at, even only once, and I would then have to let myself be guided by the points, even though as you say it makes more sense to view them as an opportune accumulation - since my thoughts would only be rational toward the goal of gaining more points.
As you can see my life would slowly but surely be taken over by loyalty cards and other faux-currency coupon schemes. I would turn into a quivering wreck.
But, I am able to quite easily ignore the
whole business, which eliminates the problem.
