Using your card to it's full Advantage (Boots Advantage Card)

Member Name: Vialdana

Product:	Boots Advantage Card
Date:	27/06/09 (50 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: loop holes that give you more points than the value of the product you buy

Disadvantages: the store knows what you're buying

A lot of shops have reward cards these days and Boots is no exception. Theirs is in fact the best one I know of in terms of the amount of money you get back per pound spent. Most give you 1 or 2 points per £1 spend at a rate of ½ to 1p per point which is ½ to 1%. Boots however gives you 4 points for every £1 you spend, and each point is worth 1p so you are actually getting 4p back in the pound (4%).

The buying things and getting points is fairly straight forward - you buy your shopping, hand over the card and get the points added on. The trick I've found however is not to do this until after you've visited one of the advantage card machines that are to be found lurking in larger boots stores. These machines let you look at special offers that are on, and print out coupons for extra points when you buy certain products.

Now over the last year I've not really spent much money or time in Boots, but in the past there have been what you might call loop holes in their system at various points which have meant that by using your advantage card carefully and buying things in the right groups you could actually accumulate more points than you were spending on certain products. I know, that sounds absolutely crazy and I have no idea how boots manage to keep going when they have these loop holes, but I can tell you they have existed and I know this because I've taken advantage of them. One of my favourite ones was the great toe separator loop hole. A particular brand of toe separator (I'm afraid I forget which), was for sale at around 50p each. That brand of products had a points deal on it where you could get 100 points for every item you bought. Now think about that carefully - 100 points = 100 pennies... a whole £1! So by buying a toe separator for 50p, you got £1 in points. Clever eh! I know I was amongst a fairly large number of people who went hunting for these toe separators and spent several £'s on them to build my points up. This meant that I was then effectively getting everything I bought on points gained from buying these toe separators for half price! - Guess what went in everyone's stockings that year! ;-)

Point spending is slightly different from some reward cards in that you don't get sent a mailing with a voucher in, and you can't just use a few points and top up with cash. You have to buy a whole item at a time with points, and there are a few things that you're not allowed to use points for, but thankfully most items you can buy this way. Something I like to do is to save my points up and use them to buy hubby and me lunch when we're out somewhere, Boots do a nice range of sandwiches and things for lunch and all of them can be bought with points. Alternatively I save all my points up and wait till Christmas when I then use them to help me finance the expensive festive season (luckily we have a large boots with a good stock of perfumes and other gift type items!).

One problem I have had is that many of the aforementioned advantage card machines don't seem to be in working order half the time. I don't know if it's just that these get a lot of use and get broken frequently, or if it's that the people who fix them don't come out very often, but some stores seem to have machines with out of order signs on them rather a lot, and this does make it harder to use the advantage card to it's errr... full advantage.

I know there are some people out there who think that these loyalty cards are a bad thing because they tell the companies who's buying what, but really I disagree. If the shops want to know what I'm putting in my basket in exchange for giving me back a bit of money then I'm really quite happy for them to have a nosey at which brands of what I buy. Especially when they are companies like boots who have these fantastic promotions where you can get more points than the value of the product that you buy.

Summary: A card that gives you 4% back in points and has offers for extra points regularly.