Forget trying to find £12bn in welfare cuts, George Osborne, simply confiscate the nation’s under-utilised loyalty cards, work out how to redeem 789 Nectar points against the £1.56tn national debt and – wahey! – next time you go to Manchester, you might be able to do so without an umbrella to protect you from the rivers of your electorate’s phlegm.
That’s because – according to research from a smartphone app that collates loyalty schemes into one place (and thus has ample commercial reason to suggest unused points are such a goldmine) – as a nation we have £6bn of unused rewards.
As a long-held point of principle related to a) corporate data concerns (which ought to have been long superseded by Apple and Google containing my life in their servers), b) not wanting Sainsbury’s to know how to flog me more fig rolls and c) the aesthetic fear of an overstuffed wallet, I’ve always avoided customer loyalty cards. (That’s with the exception of those “nine coffees and you get one free” cards that you are given by everywhere from McDonald’s to the staff canteen.) I also appear to have a Virgin Atlantic Flying Club account, for reasons I’m baffled by, as it has precisely zero points in it (the average unclaimed miles in that scheme are worth £327), plus the automatic points on my NatWest credit card – a scheme that was dropped in July, prompting me to check how many points I had accrued in a decade. Enough (29,000), it transpired, to trade for a case of wine from Laithwaite’s – leaving me with just 439 “YourPoints”. That’s a monetary value of just under a quid (2,000 points can be swapped for £5 in cash). What’s £6bn minus 92p?
Thankfully, my wife is more amenable to Sainsbury’s CEO knowing where we buy petrol, and she has a wallet full of loyalty cards, including the two most popular schemes, Nectar (Sainsbury’s, BP, Homebase, etc) and the Boots Advantage Card. The average Nectar user has £22 of unused points – she has just £3.65. Boots is more lucrative – she has 1,693 points, worth a whopping £16.93 (but she also regularly uses the card to buy stuff, so it’s not sitting there forgotten). That’s a few quid more than the £12.50 average, so presumably we’ll be OK should we find ourselves without cash in a No 7 skincare emergency. There’s also a Waterstone’s card, which is worth about a fifth of a paperback at £1.63. Alas, the supermarkets we use regularly either don’t have loyalty cards (Aldi) or just give you discounts and something with immeasurable financial value, free copies of this newspaper (Waitrose).
So, our total family contribution to the £6bn loyalty-card cash mountain? About £23. Hands off, George!
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