[spookybones]

My partner convinced me to use the Starbucks app for incentives. Unsurprisingly within months, the company doubled the points requirements for all rewards. I now have a dollar and change held hostage on it, but refuse to keep topping it up. I imagine there are many people in my situation.

[grues-dinner]

Once upon a time, 1 pence was one point (I don't recall which supermarket). Now you get 2 Nectar points per pound. I do remember my parents grumbling when it went to 1 point per two pence.

The supermarkets have gotten wise to people realising points and vouchers are scams that almost never pay out substantially and have instead started punishment pricing for people who don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.

[gruez]

>The supermarkets have gotten wise to people realising points and vouchers are scams that almost never pay out substantially for loyalty

It's called a "loyalty" program but there was hardly any "loyalty" to begin with. The points basically translate into a discount of <1%, and you get them whether you hop between stores for the best deal, or only shop at their place. The best way of thinking of them is a price discrimination scheme to rope in price-conscious shoppers.

>and have instead started punishment pricing for people who don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.

From a numeric perspective the two are identical.

[SpicyUme]

I might be using a dead person's account at several grocery stores. I just never updated the phone number I used, who knows what bucket my purchasing data goes into. But I hope it causes some inconsistency somewhere.

[gruez]

>Unsurprisingly within months, the company doubled the points requirements for all rewards.

Surely that was a coincidence? The most I could find was grumblings about the program changing back in 2019[1], but so far as I can tell it stayed the same since then. I agree points devaluations are bad, but people aren't storing their life savings in them, and the "cost" of those points are basically zero, so I'm not sure what the hand-wringing over them is about.

[1] https://www.areweadultsyet.com/2019/03/19/maximizing-the-new...