Re: Loyalty cards again

In article <13si1auhv9no7fd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Richard Eney <dicconf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>In article <memo.20080229144608.3368A@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>Paul Dormer <prd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>There was mention of loyalty cards here recently.  This news item might
>>interest some people:
>>
>>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/7229246.stm
>>
>>"A man from Bedford****re is threatening to take a supermarket giant to
>>court after it cancelled his 14 reward scheme cards and £2,000 of
>>points.
>>
>>Paul Ryan, from Bedford, collected the points in transactions at Tesco
>>and then sold the goods at car boot sales."
>>
>>To put this in perspective, with my grocery spend at Tesco (which is
>>just about the only shop I use for groceries, as it's just across the
>>street), I get vouchers for about £7 every quarter.  He must have
>>worked hard to get £2,000 worth of points.
>
>If he bought the stuff, he deserves the points.  If they restrict 
>the number of cards a person can have, they should keep track of them.
>I think he should win.

Moving right along, there's currently a campaign on Bay Area
radio (and presumably other media) wherein a supermarket is
advertising that it DOESN'T use loyalty cards.

Backstory: There was a chain called Lucky's.  There was another
chain called Albertson's, which bought out Lucky and renamed all
its stores.  In a monumentally tasteless advertising program, it
was announced that Lucky was "getting married" and changing "her"
maiden name to Albertson's.  Now, several years later, I can only
assume that it didn't work and people were going about wondering
where the Lucky's stores had gone to ... and shopping at Safeway
or something instead.  So now we hear the beep of a checkout
scanner, and an unctuous voice saying "Are you fumbling about for
your Rewards card?  Don't bother!  Come to Lucky's instead;
Lucky's is back."

Meh....

Presumably the argument is that because they don't use loyalty
cards they provide low prices to everybody, though they don't
quite come out and say so and I don't believe it anyway.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]