Incentives to Make Us Worse Off!

Like many other stores, our local supermarket chain — which is actually a national chain — has one of those rather popular "loyalty programs."

All in all I'm not complaining because it works pretty well and I have to admit that it does save us some money on our grocery bill which feels liek it is just getting out of hand. The most recent sign I saw was up by our eggs — which are already incredibly expensive compared to just a few years ago — stating that due to avian flu, eggs are limited to one package per customer, and (by the way) prices are a little higher than before because eggs are difficult to get.

Even the "cheap" house brand eggs are now $9.00 for the package of 18.

But I digress.

The latest gimmick with the loyalty program is that they have introduced an offer that you a substantial ”points bonus” — these points being redeemable for a savings either on gas or directly exchangeable for certain grocery items — for spending some particular amount of money at the store (or more) in the course of a month.

This has been running for a few months now and one of the things I've noticed is that the amount you need to spend to qualify for the bonus is just a couple of hundred dollars more than you would normally spend in a month of groceries.

Translation to English: "we try to get you to spend $200 more than you would normally want to in order to reward you with about $35.00-$50.00 worth of benefits!" Of course the catch here is that the store is depending on people getting so focused on the prize that they forget about the cost of the prize.

Of course this isn't a paradigm that is limited to your local supermarket, it's pretty much how the world of ”amazing offers” tends to work, in a broad sense. It's how a consumer society works: there is never such a thing as "enough" of anything.

Brings me back to some of my early years as a retail store proprietor. Although it was a nice store and I earned a comfortable enough living, I was seen by many as a "failure" because I was quite content with simply making a living from a single location. Why wasn't I expanding? Why wasn't I franchising? Why wasn't I trying to build a statewide chain?

I guess I'm just a lousy capitalist and consumer!

Meanwhile, I'm going to buy exactly as many groceries as we need this month, and that bonus will get to be a bonus if that's how it turns out, or — more likely — we will fall short by exactly the amount they are expecting us to spend extra to earn it!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!

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Created at 2024.12.20 23:37 PST
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