Supermarket introduces reverse loyalty scheme

The French owned discount supermarket chain Total-Prix has introduced a novel new loyalty scheme for its shoppers.

The new scheme is different because customers get rewards up front, and earn the loyalty points to pay for them later.  This gets over the main problem with ordinary schemes, which is that it takes too long to save up your points to earn rewards. The long wait for a reward puts off many shoppers and they drift away to other stores.

A spokesman for Total-Prix said, ‘This will rubbish all your so-called English reward schemes. Our rewards celebrate the best of french culture unlike your boring old nectar points. And there is no waiting for our rewards – sign up and take them home right now. Take that, ros-bifs!’

Rewards under the new scheme will include a five litre plastic container of top quality french wine, five kilograms of very runny and very smelly soft cheese, pernod, Gauloises, and CDs by top quality french bands.

Shoppers who don’t earn back the points required from shopping will be able to buy out the obligation to the store in other ways. For example, they could stack shelves, pick up litter in the car park, apprehend shoplifters or clean out the dumpsters.

Consumer groups are keen to promote competition between supermarket chains and have welcomed this innovation. They are a bit concerned that shoppers who select the wine reward, for example, will need to shop at the store every week for three to four years to pay for it.

Rachel Reeves has asked if she could get a hospital under the new scheme, and wanted to know how long it would take to pay for it.

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Flasher at checkout receives 'unexpected item in debagging area' message

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Supermarket redesigns stores to help hungrier shoppers

A well known supermarket chain is re-designing its stores to help hungrier shoppers, with help from experts at the hip-and-trendy design consultancy XL-NN.

An excitable creative from XL-NN (it’s pronounced ‘excellence’, apparently), said that there are many small things that can make a big difference for the hungrier shopper. These include wider parking spaces, bigger doorways, more robust trolleys, and stronger floors.

The problem is that hungrier shoppers, due to sub-optimal choices about diet and exercise, are not fit enough to get round a big store any more. For example, despite the obvious attractions of the pizza counter, hungrier shoppers are less likely to visit it if it’s at the back of the store. Lethargic shoppers are switching to smaller stores and larger shops are losing valuable trade.

Supermarkets see hungrier shoppers as a key customer group because food shopping is their main leisure activity.  Hungrier shoppers shop more often, are big spenders, and are a large and expanding customer group. So supermarkets are spending heavily to keep their custom and provide them with a wide range of suitable goods.

Store re-design is an essential part of this – and it’s a game changer. Until now, the strategy has been to make shoppers walk as far as possible. This meant that bread was nowhere near butter, cheese was a long way from crackers, cereals far removed from milk, and so on. The new design puts related foods right next to each other. Another change is to put staple foods at the front of the store, so that crisps, pies, doughnuts, beer, fizzy drinks, battered foods, pastries, ready meals, and chips are easy to find. Products for less hungry shoppers – quinoa, vegan cheese, yuzu, kefir, kombucha and low calorie foods – are now at the back of the store.

A spokesman for the supermarket chain said, ‘We are confident that our investments to satisfy hungrier shoppers will feed through to the bottom line, in a big way.’

image from pixabay