The Pub Curmudgeon - Every little doesn’t count

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https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TmsFOToPg...2Bclubcard.jpg
Some people regard supermarket loyalty cards as an invasion of privacy, but I have to say I’m not too bothered about the Tesco Clubcard so long as they don’t start sending me discount vouchers for carrots. I typically spend maybe £15-£20 there each week, and every three months get a coupon for £3 or so off my shop.
Every Christmas for quite a few years, they’ve sent me a batch of coupons offering me one week of £6 off if I spent £40, and then £4 off for each of the two following weeks. Their main objective, I assume, is to encourage me to do my Christmas shopping there rather than with one of their competitors, but it’s a useful discount given that I’m spending more money at that time of year anyway.
However, this year I noticed that, in the small print, alongside the usual exclusions of petrol, tobacco, infant formula milk and the like, they had added alcohol. Now, while my weekly spend isn’t primarily on drink, there’s usually a couple of bottles or cans included, and at Christmas a significant amount of the extra spending is going to be on alcohol, either for myself or as presents. I might treat myself, say, to a nice bottle of malt whisky that I wouldn’t normally do through the year.
With alcohol excluded, I would struggle to get together enough other shopping to reach the £40 threshold on even one occasion, unless there was some particular household or clothing item I wanted, which at present there isn’t. So the upshot is that the coupons end up in the recycling, and a little amount of goodwill has been lost.
I can understand that this may have to apply in Scotland because of their minimum pricing legislation, but in England it just comes across as remarkably lacking in Christmas spirit, in more ways than one. It’s yet another small, niggling turn of the prohibitionist screw.


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