Sainsbury’s has just sent me an email about its Nectar reward scheme, saying it will no longer be offering me a bonus point for every carrier bag I reuse. It will, however, be giving me 10 times bonus points on fuel.
Given how Sainsbury’s likes to flaunt its green credentials, this doesn’t seem particularly green to me! RS, Birmingham
You contacted us just before the UK’s third largest supermarket enraged its shoppers by announcing it would be halving the points they can spend in store and online to one per pound from next April.
But it is worth unpicking the background to this, given that new legislation will act as a belt-and-braces deterrent to shoppers taking single-use carrier bags. The government is introducing a 5p charge on all single-use plastic carrier bags in England in October 2015, following a similar 5p charge in Wales, Northern Ireland and (from this October) Scotland.
Apparently, few people were taking the points even when they reused a bag, so the scheme was becoming difficult and expensive to administer, claims Sainsbury’s. A spokeswoman said: “Our analysis showed that rewarding bag reuse with Nectar points was not working effectively. We also had to consider the changing landscape around plastic bag legislation … we have run many bonus fuel offers in the past, and the event next year is just a very small part of our Nectar offers.”
That said, you might well be one of the many Sainsbury’s customers threatening on Twitter to switch their custom elsewhere.
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