Excellent special offers for Tesco Clubcard holders! (Often suspiciously excellent offers, in fact) (Tesco Clubcard)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Tesco Clubcard
Date:	25/09/09 (128 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You collect points and get small amounts of money back for stuff you're buying anyway

Disadvantages: Is Supermarket-Big-Brother monitoring all your Clubcard purchases & thus watching you?

Is a Tesco Clubcard technically a credit card (for some reason, it appears in the credit card category of dooyoo)? They give me a point for every quid I spend at Tesco, but I've never been able to get any credit on mine, at any rate.

Always leery of so-called 'loyalty' club schemes - as I've seen at first hand the ridiculousness that can result when people go over the top in their obsession to collect points (spare bedrooms quite literally filled with rows and rows of all the same grocery item that was on offer and purchased just to collect the 'bonus points' associated with it) - I didn't have a Tesco Clubcard of my own for a long time. Then the big Co-op at the end of our street was bought out by (boo! Hiss!) Tesco and remodelled into one of their stores - and though I don't really like the way that Tesco operate, the location is so terribly convenient that we still end up doing most of our grocery shopping there.

Hence I now collect Clubcard points. Not obsessively or anything! In our neck of the woods for example - which is fairtrade bloody Stroud district in Gloucestershire - taking poly bags from the shops when you buy your groceries has become a definite social no-no. (Also carrying my groceries home in a cloth shoulder bag leaves my hands free so I can field my sprog when we're on the way back from the shops, and stop her running into the road - where otherwise she'd certainly be run over the huge volumes of speeding traffic that're generated by the big Tesco at the end of our street.) Not cutting a long anecdote short, you get extra Clubcard points given to you if you use a cloth bag, and though I'm pleased if I see I've received these on my receipt, I don't make a big issue out of it when I'm at the tills (which, if I was obsessed about collecting the points, I undoubtedly would do).

The way Tesco Clubcard points work is that at the end of every month, you're sent vouchers according to how much you've spent. Each point equals a penny so if you've spent £500 at Tesco and collected 500 points, they send you a voucher for £5 that you can spend in store. It's not amazing, but not that bad of a deal overall as it's money - albeit a small amount of money - for nothing, isn't it?

Well, the downside is that single item you buy is logged by Tesco when you use your Clubcard, and I know from a market-research organization that I was involved with years ago, that this kind of information is reasonably to moderately valuable to retailers. The people I was with paid me - again, not a lot - to log everything I bought in any shop with a hand-held scanner, but the point is, they did PAY me to do it, and therefore the information I was recording had some kind of monetary value to them. Clubcard monitoring I guess has now made this kind of survey system obsolete: at its worst it's an invasion of privacy, as it potentially allows supermarkets to 'profile' customers from different walks of life, and presumably, to adjust their marketing strategies accordingly. So Tesco Clubpoints: not really that innocuous, are they?

Still, most of the supermarkets offer a loyalty scheme of some sort, and the Tesco Clubcard does occasionally throw up the odd pretty good offer. For example I recently got a year's subscription to the magazine 'BBC Gardener's World' effectively for about £10-12 worth of Clubcard points earlier this year....it was a 'double points' offer and the magazine people send it (postage free) to my house each month, so I don't even have to remember to go and pick it up in the shops. If 'Gardener's World' doesn't float your boat (it isn't all that great if you get it regularly, to be honest, as every month it is very much exactly the same) they offer a wide range of other popular titles to choose from (mostly celebrity-obsessed mags like 'Heat' and 'Grazia' and all that rubbish). Given that each copy of one of these glossy mags would cost at least £3 if you were to buy it from a newsagent, this is by no means a bad deal.

There are many and varied short and long-term offers like this that you can spend your Tesco Clubcard points on. It gets a bit complex, to be honest, there're so many permutations on the theme of different special-offer deals, but you can't knock Tesco for being stingy with their point cashing-in options, that much is certain.

The one I'm saving my Clubcard points for just now is a double points offer on baby goods that seems so good I suspect there must be some kind of limit or loophole that's going to invalidate it when I come to spend my points. Effectively, if I've read the small print correctly, you'll get double the monetary value of whatever baby goods you're buying - eg. £20 of nappies etc. for half their worth in Clubcard points (ie, £20 of nappies would cost you a Clubcard point tenner), which is a pretty impressive saving, as these things cost a blasted packet.

I haven't started buying baby goods as yet as the child is not due to be born for quite a while. But maybe, just to be on the safe side, I should immediately start stockpiling nappies in the spare bedroom.....

Summary: Can't rid myself of the suspiscion that in some way, Tesco is using its Clubcard to 'lure me in'