Every little helps (Tesco Clubcard)

Member Name: caz-3124

Product:	Tesco Clubcard
Date:	29/03/09 (106 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free stuff

Disadvantages: Poor in-store points value

Tesco Clubcard is one of the store loyalty cards that stores offer to customers to encourage them to remain loyal to that one partciular store chain. By offering rewards, they hope to encourage a sense of a bond between the store and customer. However, you don't get something entirely for nothing and they use the data they collect on you to send you targetted deals which encourage you to spend more. Tesco was the first of the supermarkets to introduce the loyalty card in 1995 but others soon followed afterwards.

The card they offer you is a standard bank sized card which would fit into a wallet. This is just swiped at the till. They also offer a little key fob version that you can put on your keys and a lot of people attach them to the car keys for ease of use.

The scheme offers one point per pound spent. Not as generous as Boot's Advantage Card sadly. You can also sometimes get double points on items that are on a special promotion and now as part of Tesco's go green initiative, customers will get one point for every carrier bag they re-use which I think is a good idea and encourages people to bring the ones they had last week or buy re-usable bags. You can also gain points by using the Tesco Credit Card and they have linked up with Eon, so that if you link your account to your Eon account you earn points then too.

Then four times a year, you get a statement telling you how many points you have accrued. For exapmple if you had accrued 800 points in the last few months then you would get an £8 voucher. This could be spent instore at Tesco by handing in the coupon at the till and having £8 taken off your food bill. However, one of the more popular things to do is to use the points towards Clubcard Deals. If you use your points this way they are worth four times more. Therefore you would get £32 in deals vouchers. This is much better value and there is a good range of options to choose from. They can be used for airmiles, meals at places like Pizza Express, days out at places like Alton Towers, jewlry and magazines. There are a lot of choices available so it's easiest to go on the website and browse where it tells you how many points you need for each item.

So yes this is a good card. You earn a little back on items you have to buy anyway but it's definitely better value to use them for deals not back in-store. This isn't my favourite loyalty card but hey every little helps...

Summary: Well you may as well have it