SAFEWAYS

First they introduced the Shop-and-Go scheme designed to speed customers through the checkouts and, no doubt, reduce the number of checkout operatives further. A good idea? Perhaps, but not when nearly every customer is suspected of using it as a Shoplift-and-Go scam and needs to pass through the checkouts anyway to confirm they've clocked up all their purchases. And certainly not when half the checkout operatives are now standing in the store entrances handing out leaflets explaining how Shop-and-Go works whilst the checkout queues get longer and longer and longer.

Then, in a fit of customer service pique, they realised that removing the customer complaints book means there are no complaints - Not even any complaints that the customer complaints book is not available, and certainly no complaints that they promised its return six weeks ago but have failed to do so. But now, they have excelled themselves ...Whilst waiting in a long queue with 60% of the checkouts unmanned I happened to notice the job vacancies advertised and one in particular caught my eye ...Ambient Replenisher. Wow, I thought and decided to check this out. Further enquiries at the customer services desk (still no complaints book) revealed that an Ambient Replenisher is in fact ... A shelf stacker. Well I'll be a genealogical entity in the primate life tree! Oh, sorry, well I'll be a monkey's uncle! What will they think of next?

Why do the Safeway's checkout operators keep asking me, "Have you got an ABC card?". If I had one I'd have put it in the little slot on the divider like everyone else does. How stupid do they think their customers are? It's a thought though, how stupid are their customers? Actually I lied a bit there. I do in fact have an ABC card but refuse to use it on principal, however, answering, "Yes", to the "Have you got an ABC card?", question then just standing there without presenting it causes so much paralysis in the operator's brain that I feel guilty doing this.

This is a good trick if you're bored though, as is producing a Tesco card, and a Sainsbury's card and then spending ten minutes looking in your pockets for a non-existent card and asking can the points be added on next time you come in. Almost as much fun as deliberately getting on a bus and asking if it goes somewhere it doesn't. Safeway has finally decided to drop its ABC loyalty card because they have discovered it was costing millions of pounds to administer, and most customers have indicated that they would prefer to see savings on their purchases rather than go through all the aggravation of building up points.

Well, it took a long time to get there, but at least they've caught up with everyone else who had realised that, "points were pointless". With a return of just 1%, perhaps doubling to 2% when cashing in with goods bought with points, this was never really a profit making bonanza for the public; spending 1,000 pounds would give a return of just ten to twenty quid; hardly a reward for loyalty. Indeed, customer savings were not the goal behind any of the loyalty card schemes in the first place. The supermarkets' intentions were to be able to profile customers' shopping trends and thus provide targeted marketing direct to the customers most likely to buy particular products.

Most cost savings were going to be on the supermarket's side as they trimmed their marketing budgets as they became better at achieving purchase making hits on their targeted 'victims'. Unfortunately for the supermarkets, but thankfully for the customer, the whole thing seems to have fallen to pieces; I've never received a single piece of marketing material from them, targeted specifically at me, and I know of no one else, in the UK, who has. A complete, miserable failure then, so it would seem. And, who knows how much money has been wasted by the supermarkets in the pursuit of ever higher profits when all this expenditure could have been passed onto customer in the form of genuine savings?

The only case, where there is documentary evidence proving someone really benefited from a loyalty card points scheme, seems to be a chap who noticed that the bonus points on bananas sold in Tesco's could be cashed in at a greater value than their purchase price. Buying up all the stock, then handing it away free outside the door, earned him a small profit and made him a popular man. Except with Tesco's who had to go to a lot of trouble and expense having notices printed up for display in all their stores pointing out that bulk purchases were at the discretion of the management.

Nearly as good as the person caught opening margarine containers in the local store to see if they'd won a prize; following the calling of the police, who accepted that following the instructions on the tubs, "Open now to see if you've won a prize - No purchase necessary", meant no crime had been committed and prompted all manufacturers to rethink their labelling strategies. (Source: The Happy Hippy)