Where I live, we don’t yet have those cards. I despise the idea of them and hate getting caught out by them (I’m looking at you Tesco and Lidl).
Normal price for something - 0.49 (in stores without these cards) But in their store it’s only that price with their ‘club card’ or ‘plus membership’.
Otherwise it’s 1.59
There are loads of other items with high markups.
BUT - the marked price is the normal store price to the inexperienced shopper of these data collecting stores, with the blind spot being the need to have a store card to get the ‘discount’. My full shop was an extra 103.46 altogether between the two stores (51.22 in one 52.24 in the other) rushing to get christmas dinner and dining and extras. Should be banned. /rant
The government doing a sick job of protecting consumers. /s
Pro tip: use Jenny’s number (867-5309) with your local area code anywhere you don’t have a loyalty card. Works every time
I use this for gas. Why yes, I am Jeff D at this particular moment. Thanks for the 5¢ off/ gallon, Jeff!
This does work, I have been doing this and registering it around the country for 23 years. I used to travel a lot in the early 2000’s and have used it in at least 40 states.
or, if you’re not 70yo (and you need to give 10 digits) you can use mike jones number - 281 330 8004
Who?
mike jonnnes
Missed the part where they said “with your local area code” huh.
naw, just makin a houston-based rap joke.
Not available here unfortunately.
Use Jenny’s phone number and your area code.
8-6-7-5-3-oh-niiiieeeeiiiiine
I refused to carry the plastic cards for years, but google wallet allows you to add the barcode/qr code from a friend/stranger/family’s card or phone screen, for any shop. You then get the instant discount at the checkout but won’t accumulate the later ‘points’- but your accomplice will! There are webpages online containing the barcodes if you are really privacy-conscious. I have b&q, sainsburys, morrisons, tesco and co-op stored this way. Some shops are introducing apps too - still a line i won’t cross yet.
My whole extended family has been using my aunt’s stop and shop card for decades, ever since she asked us one xmas to help her accrue gas points. The home phone number its tied to has been defunct for at least 20 years now, and my aunt died 15 years ago. Even the address thats tied to the account afaik (I suppose one of my cousins could have updated it) no longer exists, as her dirt road, origibally known as ‘old country rd #2’ was long ago consumed by suburbs and the farms around it parceled out.
Australian media regulator publishes a list of numbers used only for fictional purposes like TV shows or whatever:
https://www.acma.gov.au/phone-numbers-use-tv-shows-films-and-creative-works
I’ve always used the first one. Every store seems to have it registered a billion times. They sometimes say “woah there’s 100s of people on this number” and I just tell them to pick one. They never care.
Yeh I’ve alwahs appreciated how these loyalty cards and memberships etcetera don’t insist of verifying or anything. Most just want an email so I just use a generator or make one up on the spot. It’s good too because they often have cheap deals for signing up today.
I will try to see if something like that is available.
I’d appreciate it if you could let us know if you find anything
I didn’t find anything in the UK, but I found in Ireland cardnado.ie I don’t know if UK cards work in Ireland or vice versa.
(area code) 867-5309
This really sounds like it would be illegal in many countries. Where are you?
But wherever you are, imho LIDL sucks ass. Around here they were the first discounter to hit the country, and forced established chains to lower prices, and so people like LIDL and believe in their slogan. But the truth is that they just package the cheapest option nicer than other supermarkets, and apparently that is still enough to make people think it’s quality stuff.
Ireland. Shitty Government lets everything slide. They are about to take over the EU presidency, they are heavily lobbied by the US Big-Techs - Watch what they try to pass in regards to privacy (removing it) over the next 6 months.
Its probably evidence of excess market power and abuse of consumers. In the UK that’s “enforced” by the competition and markets authority.
The way it works is cma does a lame investigation, the regulated parties lawyers all ‘prove’ their clients did nothing wrong. cma goes away.
cma did a review of supermarkets about 15 years ago, let them off scott free. Now they’re pushing it even further.
TBH for fresh fruit and veg and stuff there are still proper markets in most towns - so people going to supermarket are just lazy. SO I do partly blame the consumers here for not supporting a diverse economy.
That’s essentially their defence to the CMA, the consumers do have options so it can’t be abuse - they choose to give us market power because the consumers can’t be bothered to shop around. And there is something to be said for their arguments - they were given the market power by consumers - so the consumers are at least partly to blame for this situation. Consumers are benefiting from reduced shoeleather costs that may exceed the losses due to this.
CMA doesn’t do sophisticated local market and transaction costs analysis though. I’m sure there are areas where price differentials exceed transport costs - meaning there is significant lack of local consumer choice. But it takes a lot of number crunching and fine-grain geographic data to prove. I personally think they shoudl take cars out of the equation and use public transport costs+time only to figure local market size - but that’d be easy for them to argue out of court. All they have to do is allow say a 30 minute drive, and generally that will mean there is no local market power concentration.
That is a problem we regularly encounter in the UK. When we visit there, we also shop for unique British food, and boy, is this expensive without the cards.
Luckily, we’ve got smart friends who have basically made a wallet card for about every UK chain. Saves about 20-40% when we go shopping.
They do this because it allowed them to track how often you shop and what you normally buy. This helps them to manage their stock, keeping popular items that regular shoppers buy in stock etc.
The way it normally works though is that the item is $1.99 but if you have their club card or member card the item is $1.50.
This means you save money in exchange for allowing them to track your shopping habits.
Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of … We’ll call them questionable reasons why business want to track your shopping habits, and that tracking doesn’t necessarily stop as just tracking what you buy.
But it was never meant to be item is less expensive but you only get the less expensive price if you have their card. It was supposed to be, we’ll give you a deal on said item if you let us track you in exchange.
They can track what people are buying just as well without needing to know who is buying what. If all they cared about was making sure they are stocking items that are popular with customers, they could just monitor how many of the item were scanned at the checkout counters.
When you give your phone number to the store, it serves three functions:
- The rewards scheme encourages loyalty. Once you have spent hundreds at the store, they give you a minor discount on something small, which saves you only a little bit of money. You only need to decide to patronise this store one time over their competitors for this bribe to be worth it.
- By learning your shopping habits, they can offer you personalised advertisements to encourage you to buy certain products. For example, a grocery store chain which has a location near where I live has learned that I always buy a certain brand of cheese, and so occasionally they will try to tempt me with something like a 50 cent discount on that cheese, or they will send me a message saying “Hey do you still want (the cheese brand)? We have it in stock!”
- Some people, when putting things into their basket or shopping cart, will see the large, advertised discounted price and think “this item is reasonably priced”, but then they forget to put their phone number in when checking out and are thus charged the inflated price. The store pockets the difference as customers are unlikely to notice or complain about it. Most people do not closely monitor the price of items as they are being scanned. They only look at the total price at the end before tapping their card.
This helps them to manage their stock, keeping popular items that regular shoppers buy in stock etc.
Nope. Normal stock management works without tracking individual users habits.
These cards have the benefit of binding customers to your chain (and to sell ads).
One of the main grocery chains here makes you clip coupons in their app to get the price shown in the store.
The digital coupons are a pain in the ass. Sometimes the app properly clips them, other times it doesn’t. There’s like 3 different ways to enter the item, and it is inconsistent on which way will work.
Oh, Lidl does this too?
Apparently it’s not done in Lidl everywhere. It’s called “Lidl Plus”.
Yeah, not allowed here.
Lidl isn’t too bad for it, at least not around here.
Sainsburys is probably the worst for it around here. A lot of the most popular items are routinely marked up 40%. The supermarket I work for, which shall remain green and nameless, is getting worse for it too.
Aldi is doing it right IMHO. Doesn’t have an app, doesn’t accept coupons, just tries to get people through the door as fast as possible and pass some of the savings on.
