I love loyalty programs. But I don't love this about them, and it has cost me plenty …
I admit it. I'm a sucker for loyalty programs, especially if they don't cost anything to join. (Most don't.)
It's not exactly free, of course. You're giving personal information and thereby giving them a name and face to your spending habits. But I'm all right with that.
Loyalty programs and those blasted keychain things
For the most part, loyalty programs work great. They give you a credit-card-sized card, and usually a smaller keychain-sized card, that you present at the time of purchase to make them count towards free whatever.
Since I didn't have a smartphone for the past few years, those were my options for proving my loyalty. But there were problems with each of these:
- All told, my loyalty cards stacked were over a half-inch thick. I'm not a murse kind of guy so as a result, I didn't carry around all of these in my wallet. This meant that I often didn't have them with me because I'd forget to put them in my wallet when I knew I was going to a particular store.
- I keep my keys in my pocket pretty much all the time. (Now definitely all the time because the one time I did I accidentally left them in a lab and they got locked in there. Glad my wife could get a spare key out to me!) The keychain-sized cards would rub against the fabric and over time would be completely unscannable, and I'd realize this at checkout. That, and they get bulky really fast with a bunch of them on the same keychain. Which meant that I often didn't have them with me.
The common thread here is that I often didn't have the stinkin' card with me when I bought something.
My problem wasn't that I ignored the loyalty programs of these stores. I didn't have the card with me so they could credit me.
Smartphone app Stocard to the rescue
Well, I finally got sick of my dumb phone and hit up Republic Wireless to fix that.
I had heard of apps that would store a bunch of loyalty cards so that all I'd need to do would be to whip out my phone, which I should have with me pretty much at all times (if for no other reason so that my wife can see what I'm spending all this money on haha!)
Stocard is the one I downloaded. It had the highest rating of similar apps and it's pretty slick. The search function had every chain store I had a card for. I could enter the majority of my card numbers simply by scanning the barcode on the card with my phone. It even let me enter my library card numbers.
Pulling up the card on demand is pretty easy:
- Unlock the phone
- Tap on the app
- Tap on the card
I haven't tried this yet but supposedly it makes cards from nearby stores available from the lock screen if the location is turned on. Even easier!
Four steps to organizing your loyalty programs
Stocard is a nice-to-have thing but it's not necessary, of course.
For me, getting the cards into the Stocard app was the easy part. The harder part was consolidating my cards and verifying that the credentials were still good. If I didn't have the phone app I could still take advantage of all of the loyalty programs, but I'd have to get organized. The phone app just made things easier after I got organized.
Here's what I did (you can stop:
- I gathered my loyalty cards. My loyalty cards were mixed in with business cards, prepaid phone cards, pictures of my daughter, etc., so this took time. Hopefully, you're more organized than I am but if not, this will take a bit of time.
- One by one I went to the websites to try to log in to my loyalty accounts. Admittedly I hadn't used some of these cards for a while, so my first stop was Google. Some were easier than others. One took a really long time because it had been ages since I'd used the loyalty program, and my contact email address was a Yahoo! address that I hadn't accessed in probably close to a decade. I had to call customer service to update my email address.
- Once I got in I made sure that the loyalty card number I had matched what was in the account. Either the loyalty card number was already correct in my loyalty account, or I could link the one I had in hand with my account. Occasionally I'd get an entirely different loyalty card number.
- I then verified that the card numbers were correctly entered in Stocard. Because I want this to work next time! (Alternatively, if you don't want to use an app, you can just stack the cards in a known place if you don't want to carry them around with you all the time, or you can put them in a purse if that's your thing.)
Now, I won't lose any CVS ExtraCare! Or any other loyalty program reward, for that matter!
What is your favorite way of managing the insanity of loyalty programs?
