The SM chain of stores have what is called the "SM Advantage Card", which is a card that is swiped every time you make a purchase... earning you discount pisos. Pretty much every store at SM Mall participates: SM Department Store, SM Grocery, Ace Hardware, My Home furniture store... and on and on.
The SM Advantage Card has to be the biggest waste of time I've ever seen: It takes about 5 seconds to swipe that card at every purchase... and those few seconds are a waste of time when multiplied by the 100-or-so times I've had the card swiped.
When you consider that every appliance and plate and cup in my kitchen comes from SM, every piece of furniture, gifts for the family, and pretty much every bit of food we have eaten at home over the past few months all comes from SM... about $2,500 worth of money spent by my estimate... what do you think our "reward" would be? I checked our balance. It was $6. That is, for every $400 you spend, you get $1 back.
Well, the card does have Epril's name embossed on it, and it's apparently the first time she's ever had anything that represents some kind of tacit financial agreement with a business in her own name. She enjoys looking at the card. She giggles, and says, "that's my name," to the cashier when she hands over the card. I suppose that makes it worth it in a way.Epril had her friend Kim over visiting yesterday, and Susan cooked a very nice pork in a sweet "Mongolian" sauce. Other than that, nothing too much going on.
No matter where you live, it seems those advantage cards aren't worth much.
ReplyDeleteI have 2 of those, one allows me to redeem vouchers in the store iteself, and after 3 years and a couple of thousands spent I decided to redeem those points, that bought me a nice cheap t-shirt and a necklace.
The other one is basically about exchanging points for gifts, but when you do the math you realise that you will have to spend nearly 1500$ to claim an iPod, totally not worthy.
Cyn, I must be misunderstanding you on that second one, because that sounds pretty good: You buy $1,500 worth of stuff and get an IPod? Or is it that you have to actually pay $1,500 (without getting anything in exchange) for an IPod?
ReplyDeleteBy the way... I actually remember a good one at one of the pharmacies in New York City: At any time, about 10% of the items in the store were randomly "secretly on sale".
ReplyDeleteYou would take your pile of things up to the checkout counter, and the cashier would ring up your sale. Then she would take your card, swipe it, and sometimes (about one in four times, perhaps?) the price would go down a few dollars. The rest of the time, nothing.
That was fun.
I roughly tried to convert what it would do from Indian rupees to USD :-)
ReplyDeleteAnd that's fot the iPod mini, I haven't checked the reward site for that card in ages, I'm pretty sure you end up having to spend more to get a lot of point to get any other iPod.
The 30GB video iPod has a market price of about 250-300$ or so here, so having to purchase for thousands worth of $$$ to finally get enough points for that stuff is pretty much stupid. In fact most of the offers they have in their catalog are good, but nothing I can't buy formyself or would not think of buying for myself and use those points.
Oh and yeah I also remember a good card in Switzerland, it was a supermarket chain one, not only did the card offered additional discounts on weekly specials, but the points earned made up for some good gifts in their huge catalog, plus since it was a supermarket, you are bound to spend most of your income in there anyway so the points added up faster too, I remember ordering a few great DVD's and christmas gifts with my loyatly program card there.
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